Hollywood North
Hollywood North
R | 12 January 2004 (USA)
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The making of a serious, Canadian arthouse film descends into Hollywood farce when its producer is forced to compromise his vision to accommodate his drug-addled star, his leading lady and his venal backers.

Reviews
Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.
Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
Seraherrera The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity
Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Wizard-8 There's no doubt that the Canadian tax shelter filmmaking era could be satirized, but this movie doesn't support that. The movie doesn't really go into depth about the system - I suspect that many viewers (even Canadian) won't know anything about the era, and will be confused by some parts of the movie. (I was fortunate enough to know about the era and the Canadian film industry, so I was able to understand these parts.) Part of this can be blamed on the frequent hurried and rushed feeling of the movie - there is long narration at the beginning instead of showing us what the narrator tells us, for one thing. Movie has a poor sense of time - you never feel this is 1979, and at one point, snow starts falling in the area but later the events of the movie are happening in the late summer! What really sinks the movie are the portrayal of most of the characters. They are thin, but for the most part they are so goofy we can't believe what they do. The few characters that stay serious are good (John Neville does well as the past-his-prime director character), and we see that a movie that would have been more serious and done things that COULD and DID happen would be more engaging (and would probably be a lot more funny.) The movie is also hampered by a low budget that gives the movie a murky and dark look.From the closing credits, it appears that the Canadian government (via the Telefilm Canada film funding agency) financed this movie. This movie is just one example of the millions of dollars Telefilm has spent in financing bad movies no one wants to see. What the Canadian industry really needs is a movie that will savagely attack Telefilm and its questionable practices.
smatysia Ouch! This one was a bit painful to sit through. It has a cute and amusing premise, but it all goes to hell from there. Matthew Modine is almost always pedestrian and annoying, and he does not disappoint in this one. Deborah Kara Unger and John Neville turned in surprisingly decent performances. Alan Bates and Jennifer Tilly, among others, played it way over the top. I know that's the way the parts were written, and it's hard to blame actors, when the script and director have them do such schlock. If you're going to have outrageous characters, that's OK, but you gotta have good material to make it work. It didn't here. Run away screaming from this movie if at all possible.
Brandt Sponseller A mock documentary about a pair of Canadian producers, Bobby Myers (Matthew Modine) and Paul Linder (Saul Rubinek), trying to make their first film in the late 1970s. Hollywood North is the comic tale of their struggle to pull everything together, despite a number of conflicting threads.Hollywood North works as a film in a way very similar to why This Is Spinal Tap (1984) works so well. Namely, although exaggerated in some ways, it is very close to the truth, and the truth consists of "behind the scenes" facts that are very different than the public face of the industry. It isn't easy to make a film, and it must have been especially difficult in Canada in the late 1970s. Films involve tens, if not hundreds, of people. Many have incompatible desires, motivations and personalities. Especially crucial are the financiers and the on-screen talent, as if either drops out or becomes undependable at any stage while the film is in production, it could jeopardize the whole affair, either necessitating extensive reshoots or abandoning the film altogether.So it's not surprising that Hollywood North focuses on those kinds of relationships. The result is an excellent film that is both hilarious and tragic at the same time. The script is flawless and the performances are top notch. This is a must-see for any budding filmmaker and anyone with a serious interest in the craft of film-making. It should also be more than entertaining for any viewer with a modicum of intelligence and a sense of humor.A 10 out of 10 from me.
derra Hollywood North's storyline was good (A producer buys the film rights of afamous Canadian novel known as "Latern Moon" and plans the production, buteverything doesn't go according to plan when Hollywood gets involved and thedocumentary filmmaker catches the whole debacle of film.) and the film hadmuch potential, but most of the acting lacked depth. Hence, the characters were not believable and flat. Unfortunately, they spent a lot of money making a film that did not make very much money in he end. The actor in it that did a great job was Kim Coates.