Wyndham Wise

Wyndham Wise is the former publisher and editor-in-chief of Take One: Film in Canada. Currently, he is a contributing editor with Northernstars.ca and consultant with The Canadian Encyclopedia. Visit him at wyndhamsfilmguide.ca.

Culture, History

Adolph Zukor: The Napoleon of Motion Pictures

April 4, 2012, By Wyndham Wise
Famous Players Lasky Corporation

The Famous Players Lasky Corporation

A friend in the business passed along an email press release a while back because he assumed I might be interested. It opened with, “Cineplex Entertainment will celebrate 100 years of movies and movie-going memories in 2012.” Curious, I thought. As a corporate entity, Cineplex has only been around since 1979, when entertainment lawyer/producer Garth Drabinsky and distributor/exhibitor Nat Tayor launched the company with their first Cineplex theatres in Toronto’s Eaton Centre. Hardly the birth of cinema (the first public screening took place in Paris, Dec. 28, 1895), so what was “1912” referring to?

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Culture, In the News

Still Dreaming of a Perfect Genie

March 5, 2012, By Wyndham Wise

The 2012 Genie Awards are upon us once again with high hopes and low grumbling.

There are high hopes for a film industry perennially long on promise but short on delivery, and grumbling from critics who have watched the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, the organization responsible for the Genie and the Gemini Awards, struggle to live up to its claim that its awards are the “ultimate accolade” for Canadian films.

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Culture

Canadian Romantic Movies, Eh?

February 7, 2012, By Wyndham Wise
sandra_oh_last_night

A still from the 1998 film "Last Night" starring Sandra Oh and Don McKellar.

Canadian filmmakers have long maintained an uneasy relationship with romantic films – comedy or drama – at least in their classical form. If the Hollywood version ends by finding stability in couples (and the famous last kiss), the typical Canadian romantic comedy leaves its lovers alone and somehow unfulfilled. They tend to be off-kilter, with only a few actually telling a romantic tale straight up. In a country more famous for producing seriously deranged love stories such as Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed and David Cronenberg’s Crash, notable Canadian romantic movies have been few and far between. Here’s a sampling of the best half-dozen for your Valentine’s Day viewing – and some even have a happy ending.

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Culture, In the News

David Cronenberg: From Shivers to Respectability

January 23, 2012, By Wyndham Wise

David Cronenberg at the Toronto International Film Festival, Maclean's

“If David Cronenberg did not exist, would we invent him? Could we invent him?” – Tom McSorley, Take One: Film in Canada

Living in this peculiar, fractious confederation called Canada, it is satisfying to observe the slow but certain ascension of David Cronenberg to the status of full-blown Canadian cultural institution – to see him in the polite, lofty company of Margaret Atwood, Peter Mansbridge or Robert Lepage. For this is a country of supremely timid and conservative cultural inclinations, which tends to favour longevity over vitality, and cast its more indelicate cultural voices into permanent exile from the mainstream.

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