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The Suburbanators
''The Suburbanators'' is a Canadian road movie/comedy film written and directed by Gary Burns and produced in 1995 by Burns and John Hazlett. It tells the story of bored, estranged slackers in their 20s who spend their time in suburban strip-malls, subdivisions and car lots in Calgary. The film was made for CDN$65,000. It was invited to play at the Sundance Film Festival and sold to the Sundance Channel.Melnyk, George.''One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema''. University of Toronto Press, 2004. p. 220 It is the first of what writer George Melnyk calls a trilogy which concludes with '' Kitchen Party'' (1998) and ''waydowntown'' (2000). Plot Bob and Al are passing time by driving around and looking for marijuana. In another part of town, two other young men, Eric and Carl, are also trying to buy drugs. A group of three musicians are at a Middle Eastern restaurant. They go to the suburbs to find a relative after they accidentally get their instruments locked up in an apartment. Carl st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Road Movie
A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives. Road movies often depict travel in the hinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence, a "distinctly existential air"Cohan, Steven and Hark, Ina Rae. "Introduction". ''The Road Movie Book''. Eds. Cohan, Steven and Hark, Ina Rae. Routledge, 2002. p. 1 and 6 and is populated by restless, "frustrated, often desperate characters".Laderman, David. ''Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie''. University of Texas Press, 2010. Ch. 1 The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gary Burns (director)
Gary Burns (born 1960) is a Canadian film writer and director. Burns studied drama at the University of Calgary before attending Concordia University, where he graduated in 1992 from the Fine Arts film program. Born in Calgary, Alberta, many of Burns' films are shot in Calgary, and contain references to the particularities of living in the city. The Plus 15 system becomes the habitrail of urban semi-professionals in waydowntown and the public transportation system becomes a node where lives intersect in ''The Suburbanators''. '' Radiant City'' examines the seemingly endless amount of suburban neighbourhoods that has overtaken Calgary. Burns is an alumnus of the University of Calgary's television program. Film festival acceptance His works have been very well received at Canadian film festivals. His first feature film, '' The Suburbanators'', debuted at the 1995 Toronto International Film Festival, where it placed in the top ten Canadian films and was also invited to the Sundance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slacker
A slacker is someone who habitually avoids work or lacks work ethic. Origin According to different sources, the term ''slacker'' dates back to about 1790 or 1898. "Slacker" gained some recognition during the British Gezira Scheme in the early to mid 20th century, when Sudanese labourers protested their relative powerlessness by working lethargically, a form of protest known as "slacking". World wars In the United States during World War I, the word "slacker" was commonly used to describe someone who was not participating in the war effort, specifically someone who avoided military service, equivalent to the later term ''draft dodger''. Attempts to track down such evaders were called ''slacker raids''. During World War I, U.S. Senator Miles Poindexter discussed whether inquiries "to separate the cowards and the slackers from those who had not violated the draft" had been managed properly. A ''San Francisco Chronicle'' headline on 7 September 1918, read, "Slacker is Doused in B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival (formerly Utah/US Film Festival, then US Film and Video Festival) is an annual film festival organized by the Sundance Institute. It is the largest independent film festival in the United States, with more than 46,660 attending in 2016. It takes place each January in Park City, Utah; Salt Lake City, Utah; and at the Sundance Resort (a ski resort near Provo, Utah), and acts as a showcase for new work from American and international independent filmmakers. The festival consists of competitive sections for American and international dramatic and documentary films, both feature films and short films, and a group of out-of-competition sections, including NEXT, New Frontier, Spotlight, Midnight, Sundance Kids, From the Collection, Premieres, and Documentary Premieres. History 1978: Utah/US Film Festival Sundance began in Salt Lake City in August 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival in an effort to attract more filmmakers to Utah. It was founded by Ster ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sundance TV
Sundance TV (formerly known as Sundance Channel) is an American pay television channel owned by AMC Networks that launched on February 1, 1996. The channel is named after Robert Redford's character in ''Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid'' and, while it is an extension of Redford's non-profit Sundance Institute, the channel operates independently of both the Institute and the Sundance Film Festival. Originally, Sundance was devoted to airing documentaries, independent feature films, short films, world cinema, and coverage on the latest developments from each year's Sundance Film Festival. The channel has since incorporated both original and acquired programming and became fully ad-supported in 2013, with programming being edited for content soon thereafter. , the channel was available to approximately 60.668 million households with television (52.1% of all subscribers) in the United States. History As Sundance Channel (1996–2014) After negotiations during 1994 broke down ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kitchen Party (film)
''Kitchen Party'' is a 1997 film written and directed by Gary Burns ('' The Suburbanators''). The movie cast a number of then-unknown young Canadian actors, including Scott Speedman, Laura Harris, and Tygh Runyan, and was released on September 8, 1997 at the Toronto International Film Festival. Plot In the bored suburban atmosphere of a Canadian city, Scott (Scott Speedman) decides to throw a celebratory get-together with friends in his parents' home. Unfortunately, there's a catch: Scott's parents happen to be particularly anal about the direction the carpet fibers lay and the distance from doily to table-edge. This means that the only part of the house that is safe, that is, the only part of the house with no carpeting and therefore no potential mess, is the tiled kitchen. The festivities begin once the parents go off to a party of their own, leaving Scott and his buddy, Wayne (Tygh Runyan), with a house that would be entirely empty but for Scott's mysterious brother lurking ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Waydowntown
''Waydowntown'' (stylized as ''waydowntown'') is a 2000 film directed by Gary Burns and starring Fab Filippo, Don McKellar, Marya Delver and Michelle Beaudoin. The film is a dark comedy that explores office culture and its effects and often uses surrealism to achieve its thematic goals. The film is set in Calgary, Alberta, where many downtown buildings are connected by the Plus 15, an extensive network of indoor skywalks. Because of this network, the hustle and bustle of the traditional "main street" has been replaced by recirculated air, food courts, and fluorescent lights. The result is a bleak and often humorous dark comedy about Canadian corporate culture. Plot The film centres on a group of office colleagues in downtown Calgary, Alberta, who bet a month's salary on who can last the longest without going outside by using the system of covered walkways that connect the buildings. The film takes place over one lunch hour on day 24 of the month-long competition. Things ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Generation X
Generation X (or Gen X for short) is the Western demographic cohort following the baby boomers and preceding the millennials. Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1960s as starting birth years and the late 1970s to early 1980s as ending birth years, with the generation being generally defined as people born from 1965 to 1980. By this definition and U.S. Census data, there are 65.2 million Gen Xers in the United States as of 2019. Most members of Generation X are the children of the Silent Generation and early boomers; Xers are also often the parents of millennials and Generation Z. As children in the 1970s and 1980s, a time of shifting societal values, Gen Xers were sometimes called the "latchkey generation," which stems from their returning as children to an empty home and needing to use the door key, due to reduced adult supervision compared to previous generations. This was a result of increasing divorce rates and increased maternal participation in the wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1995 Films
File:1995 Events Collage V2.png, From left, clockwise: O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman from the year prior in "The Trial of the Century" in the United States; The Great Hanshin earthquake strikes Kobe, Japan, killing 5,000-6,000 people; The Unabomber Manifesto is published in several U.S. newspapers; Gravestones mark the victims of the Srebrenica massacre near the end of the Bosnian War; Windows 95 is launched by Microsoft for PC; The first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b, is discovered; Space Shuttle Atlantis docks with the Space station Mir in a display of U.S.-Russian cooperation; The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed by domestic terrorists, killing 168., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 O. J. Simpson murder case rect 200 0 400 200 Kobe earthquake rect 400 0 600 200 Unabomber Manifesto rect 0 200 300 400 Oklahoma City bombing rect 300 200 600 400 Srebrenica massacre rect 0 400 200 600 Space Shuttle ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canadian Drama Road Movies
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''Canadian''. Canada is a multilingual and multicultural society home to people of groups of many different ethnic, religious, and national origins, with the majority of the population made up of Old World immigrants and their descendants. Following the initial period of French and then the much larger British colonization, different waves (or peaks) of immigration and settlement of non-indigenous peoples took place over the course of nearly two centuries and continue today. Elements of Indigenous, French, British, and more recent immigrant customs, languages, and religions have combined to form the culture of Canada, and thus a Canadian identity. Canada has also been strongly influenced by its linguistic, geographic, and e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
English-language Canadian Films
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the island of Great Britain. Existing on a dialect continuum with Scots, and then closest related to the Low Saxon and Frisian languages, English is genealogically West Germanic. However, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of France (about 29% of Modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group of West Germanic ( Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Films Directed By Gary Burns
A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound and, more rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it. Recording and transmission of film The moving images of a film are created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects. Before the introduction of digital production, series of still images were recorded on a strip of chemically sensitiz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
