New documentary finds humour in 'Being Canadian'

spaminator

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New documentary finds humour in 'Being Canadian'

By Liz Braun, Postmedia Network First posted: Tuesday, April 28, 2015 10:12 AM EDT | Updated: Tuesday, April 28, 2015 10:24 AM EDT
- What the hell is Canadian food?
- What is it about Canada that creates so many funny people?
- How do you deal with that f-----g weather?
Those are but a few of the pressing questions posed in Being Canadian, a delightful new documentary from filmmaker Rob Cohen.
Being Canadian is a featured film at this year's Hot Docs festival and is available on demand all over the country.
Cohen, who is better known as an Emmy Award winning writer on such series as The Ben Stiller Show, The Simpsons, The Wonder Years and American Dad! undertook the film as a labour of love. He put it together over seven years.
The entertaining documentary plays a bit like an extended inside joke; part social study, part comedy and part travelogue, the movie enlists the help of Canadian celebrities — Alex Trebek, Rush, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Seth Rogen, Martin Short, Jason Priestley, Cobie Smulders, Michael J. Fox, William Shatner and many others — to answer important questions about this country.
The movie also includes commentary from American stars (such as Ben Stiller and Kathy Griffin) and regular folks from all over the place. In his opinion, says Cohen, "Those people are all a little jealous of Canadians."
A Calgary native, Cohen has lived in Los Angeles for many years and he's married to an American. (His wife is Jill Leiderman, executive producer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!) Still, he regards himself as a tried and true Canuck.
He says the experience of being a Canadian in the United States, "Is kind of a pleasant secret."
The filmmaker drove coast to coast making Being Canadian, and was surprised — in a good way — by this country and its people at every turn. His general affection for Canada began in his hometown of Calgary, which he obviously loves.
"It's just the coolest town when you're a kid. It’s a cowboy town, but you've got skiing and scenery. I honestly love it. Banff to me is the best place in the world. It's the coolest town and Calgary is the best city — rivers and mountains and cowboys and some big oil personalities."
For all his writer/director/producer credits (he's co-executive producer of The Big Bang Theory and directs TV shows and commercials) Cohen's biggest claim to fame may be that he inspired the character Milhouse Van Houten on The Simpsons, where his brother, Joel Cohen, is a writer and producer.
A self-described 'super-nerd', Cohen says he and his brother were attracted to TV comedies like Monty Python and The Two Ronnies, "But neither of us had aspirations of comedy or show business. We both kind of fluked into our careers.
"Through weird circumstances we both ended up working in this field."
After high school, Cohen went to Los Angeles to visit a cousin. And never left.
He worked at odd jobs — shoe salesman, security guard, food delivery.
"One of the guys I delivered deli to was a TV producer, and he told me if I ever wanted to leave the glamorous world of pastrami carrying to call him," says Cohen. "So I did, and he got me a job as a production assistant on the Tracey Ullman Show."
Cohen learned the business by osmosis. He says, with typical Canadian self-deprecation, that he only got into writing comedy because he wanted to help the writers on the show as they laboured long into the night, trying to come up with jokes. As a lowly production assistant, Cohen couldn't leave until they did, and so he started feeding the writers material — hoping to get home earlier.
"I'd start to slip them jokes. The hope was that they'd leave," he says, "not that I'd get into comedy. They were very kind to buy an idea of mine for a sketch, and I got an agent. There was no master plan."
He adds, "I am genuinely appreciative of the weird series of flukes that led me to this."
The Hot Docs film festival continues in Toronto through May 3.
Twitter: @LizBraunSun
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
William Shatner with Rob Cohen.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC0tAdR_b3U
New documentary finds humour in 'Being Canadian' | Movies | Entertainment | Toro
 

spaminator

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Being Canadian review: Celebs help paint picture of what makes us funny
By Liz Braun, Postmedia Network First posted: Thursday, May 07, 2015 06:16 PM EDT | Updated: Thursday, May 07, 2015 06:23 PM EDT
What does it mean to be Canadian? What is our national identity?
And what the hell is poutine?
These are just some of the questions filmmaker Rob Cohen hopes to answer in his good-natured documentary, Being Canadian, a collection of observations, interviews and travel tips aimed at uncovering the heart of a very large country.
Cohen (better known as an Emmy Award-winning writer on such TV series as The Ben Stiller Show, The Simpsons, The Wonder Years and American Dad!) is a Calgary native who has spent most of his adult life in Los Angeles.
He says being a Canadian in the U.S. always feels a bit like having a special secret, and for this film, he attempts to find out just what it is that makes Canada and her people unique.
Cohen decided to drive coast to coast in the making of Being Canadian, and his journey turns up all manner of interesting people and places — though nothing particularly unexpected.
It's his interviews with various famous Canadians, however, that make the movie worthwhile. Over 90 minutes, he talks to such high profile Canucks as Alex Trebek, the members of Rush, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Eugene Levy, Seth Rogen, Catherine O'Hara Martin Short, Jason Priestley, Cobie Smulders, Michael J. Fox and William Shatner, among others.
There are also contributions from some of his American buddies, such as Ben Stiller and Kathy Griffin.
Being Canadian is divided into little chapters on food, sport, weather, etc. organized as questions to be answered.
The best question the movie poses is this: What is it about Canada that creates so many funny people? But Cohen doesn't really come up with an answer.
Being Canadian is often amusing, but it's a SparkNotes version of Canadian life. Some historical detail is delivered with humour, and that works well, but Cohen eventually winds up the movie in what seems like a rush, imposing newly minted notions about national pride and increased sophistication.
It's a finale that carries a touch of condescension. You can tell Cohen aims to please — speaking of national characteristics — in what purports to be a love letter to the country, but the movie still has a patronizing tone from time to time.
Maybe the target audience is Americans?
Being Canadian opens in select cities this Friday and is available on demand.
Twitter: @LizBraunSun
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
Being Canadian review: Celebs help paint picture of what makes us funny | Review
 

Tecumsehsbones

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Do Canadians ever write, film, sculpt, whatever on any subject other than being Canadian? The operative definition of which appears to be "not American."