Oh, Canada

With such a great cast of actors like Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, and Michael imperioli, you would think you'd have of star power to create a better movie than this. Well, you would be wrong. Paul Schrader goes "experimental" in a movie that looks like something a first year film student would make.

Schrader claims to have been friends with the war protester/filmmaker on whose life story this film is based, but with friends like this who needs enemies?

Richard Gere's character becomes increasingly more unlikable, and gradually loses the ability to express himself in words as he rages at everyone around him, mumbling as he descends into darkness. In other words he becomes just like Paul Schrader is today.

Do yourself a favor and skip this one, even on streaming I can't imagine it would be any better if you're able to pause it and leave the room to do more important things than watch this sad excuse of a movie.

A movie about a selfish, fictionalised, elderly, frail, ill and once-heralded documentary filmmaker (played by Richard Gere), whose docs seem to have been all but forgotten bar the aficionados, agrees to an all-day interview to recount his life and career, and which the producer pitches as a means to re-establish his credentials for a new generation.

Sadly, it's nothing more than an ego trip for Gere, perhaps hoping this film will get him an Oscar nomination, which is risible given he can't act and is the same bland baloney sandwich in everything. Uma Thurman plays his wife and supposed muse but she has so little to do and say with such a two-dimensional character, it's inexplicable why she even bothered to do this. The same can be said of Michael Imperioli's role, and all those of All the other characters - they're nothing but shadows: no depth or complexity or shine.

Worse, the ploddingly insipid-sounding songs (reminiscent of Nick Drake but with none of the talent) as scene music/ambience are as dull as the script - or rather, the "pretentious literary drivel" as the filmmaker once accurately remarks of his own pathetic, early and failed attempt at being a novelist - and the tiresome, vacuous flashback scenes all pile one atop another to hammer home the same banal point: that Gere's character is utterly selfish, feckless and incredibly dull. Why anyone of the women in his life ever wanted to sleep with him, or spend time with him, is as incomprehensible as why anybody would want to speak with such a bland blancmange of a personality.

Unless you're looking for a cure for insomnia, or a good reason to throw/shout something at your screen while watching this, save yourself six hours of your life - ok, so it's 90 mins -but it Feels like six - and do something more meaningful instead, like watch Pity (2018), the brilliant foreign film by Babis Makridis.

Perusing the reviews already on here regarding this movie. I notice there are a wide range of scores and views. Some giving it 8 or higher pronouncing it a work of genius. Where as others are giving it a 3 or less. Claiming it a bunch of pretentious rubbish.

Where do I stand? Hmm. I've just watched it and I am still digesting. It is possibly a movie to be watched several times to get the true meaning. Although I must admit there is no way I would sit through this film again. I'm pleased I have seen it but it certainly will not be going in my bag of films to watch again.

I'm going down the middle with a 5. That's possibly being too kind.

In dull & pretentious drama "Oh Canada" reknowned but dying Canada-based film-maker Richard Gere gives a deathbed account of his life (directed at wife Uma Thurman) featuring in flashback his younger self Jacob Elordi abandoning one then another wife (the latter with his baby son) before permanently crossing into Canada in '68 to dodge the Vietnam War draft. Prolific writer / director Paul Schrader has always been hit 'n' miss, and this absolute stinker is a DEFINITE miss (despite support from the likes of Michael Imperioli & Jake Weary). Gere btw falls asleep as he delivers his self-important monologue... and he will not have been alone. Excrutiating.

Richard Gere is a respected maker of hard-hitting, muckraking documentary films. He works with his wife and producer, Uma Thurman. Many years ago he fled from the United States in protest over the Viet Nam War. Now it is 2023, he is dying, and several students of his are making a documentary, interviewing him over the protests and under the watchful eye of his producer and wife, Uma Thurman.

Schrader is a careful writer, and there are several ways to interpret this movie. Certain critics have called it "autobiographical" because they are so intellectually lazy that they can't be bothered to think more than one thought before they give up. There may be autobiographical points to this movie. Certainly the movie reflect Schraeder's opinions, rather, than say, a panda bear's, or those of a large lump of rock scraped down from the Laurentian Shield into the terminal morrain of Long Island. That, I believe, doesn't make it autobiographical, nor does the fact that the guy is a film maker. There are film makers and film makers. Even though Gere and the folks making the film-within-the-film want to make a sensational film no matter what the cost, Miss Thurman's only wish is to protect her husband, even though she already knows the worst.

I did consider whether this was a meditation on film making itself. It certainly has aspects of that. A film maker will shoot many more feet of film than he winds up needing, and edits it into a final form that may or may not bear any relationship to reality or the film maker's original intentions. As Gere dies on camera and over the course of the movie, the events of his life that he wishes to tell come up confused and mishappen, conflating and confabulating with each other. To make sense of that, to make a movie of that -- for the guys within the film already have a contract to sell the film -- will require an editor. That is the true work of any story teller: to arrange events and characters within a story, so that it makes sense to the audience.

But more central to understanding this film is to see that, like others in Schraeder's body of work, it is primarily concerned with outrage. In some ways his work resembles that of Ingmar Bergman: raised religiously, he pondered human fallibility in a world with no G*d to lend an objective framework of right and wrong: puzzlement and disappointment, leaving the audience the question of how to work out a system of morality. Schraeder, on the other hand, seems outraged, filled with despair, and leaving the mess to be cleaned up by the unfortunate survivors. Gere leaves the film makers to make sense of his interview, and Miss Thurman to clean up the mess and lies he has made of his life. It's not Gere's problem: he's dead. And it's not Schraeder's.

Anyway, those are a couple of the ways of viewing the film that I came up with. If you see the movie, despite the fact there's not an explosion or a good joke on view, let me know if they make sense to you. And if you have any interpretations that are different, too.