This falls into the “this is a good thing to know,” as opposed to the “this is definitely good news (!),” category. The Bechdel Test is a quick and dirty way to gauge the sexism of a movie, invented 25 years ago by Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist and writer of Dykes to Watch Out For. A film needs to meet three criteria to pass:

1. It must have at least two female characters;
2. They must talk to one another at some point;
3. They must talk at least once about anything other than men.

So how does Hollywood do?  You can go take a look at the statistics and graphs yourself but, the bottom line is: not well. Of the movies reviewed at bechdeltest.com only half (half!) pass. The most shocking number: 13% of the movies have only two points—meaning slightly more than a tenth of the reviewed films feature women who only talk about men.

It’s not as if the films of the 1960s are skewing the numbers or anything. This is a pattern that, if anything, is picking up momentum. Let’s go over some recent releases: The Social Network (one point), How to Train your Dragon (one point), Inception (two points—women who are dreamed up by men don’t count), The Trotsky (two points), Iron Man 2 (two points), The A-Team (zero points), etc.

Of course, a movie having three points doesn’t automatically mean it’s feminist-friendly (go check out some of the comments on the latest Twilight movie which, on a technicality, squeaked out a pass). In this case failing means a whole lot more than passing but, for your own edification at least, the Bechdel Test is…revealing.

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

The title of Quebec director Stéphane Lafleur’s Continental, un film sans fusil (Continental, A Film Without Guns) is not only a playful warning to viewers seeking the adrenaline hit of an American action movie. A classic on the Quebec line-dance circuit, The Continental Walk is an American dance tune written by Hank Ballard—the man behind The Twist and The Hoochie Coochie Coo (line dancing is very popular with Quebec singles’ clubs). Their backs rigid, dancers of the Continental glide across the floor in sync, moving backward, then forward and to the left and right, occasionally jumping up and clicking their heels together. Like the characters in Lafleur’s feature, the lone dancers cross paths without touching each other. Lafleur pointedly drew from American popular culture for the title of his film, which follows the lives of four quintessentially North American characters lost in the circumstance of their suburban lives.

Lafleur is one of a generation of thirtysomething Québécois filmmakers, coming to be referred to as the “Quebec New Wave,” who explore the disquiet and confusion of life on this continent. Although these young filmmakers justifiably reject being labelled as a collective, taken together, their work reflects a new sensibility in Quebec cinema. While the characters speak French, their experience as members of North America’s largest francophone minority barely registers. Their cultural reference points are universally North American, not specific to Quebec. Questions of language and nation are conspicuously absent.

Critically acclaimed at home and increasingly recognized on the international festival circuit, Quebec New Wave directors include Yves-Christian Fournier (Tout est parfait, Everything is Fine); Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault (A l’ouest de Pluton, West of Pluto); Maxime Giroux (Demain, Tomorrow); Rafaël Ouellet (Derrière moi, Behind Me); Denis Côté (Carcasses, Carcass), Simon Lavoie (Le déserteur, The Deserter); and Guy Édoin (Les Affluents, a trilogy of short films).

Still from 'A l'ouest de Pluton' (2008), directed by Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault.

New Wave films are minimalist, reflective, and marked by the austere influence of distinctive, deliberate filmmakers like Roy Andersson, Pedro Costa, Ulrich Seidl, Darren Aronofsky, Gus Van Sant, and Bruno Dumont. They focus on the seemingly mundane, morose aspects of daily life, often with painstaking slowness. The dialogue is sparse and the takes are long. The themes they explore are dark: social isolation, the breakdown of the family, teenage suicide, and prostitution. And while they draw heavily on the work of Northern and Eastern European auteur filmmakers for their harsh, in-your-face realism, the Quebec New Wave is firmly rooted in the landscape and culture of North America. Many of their characters seem trapped in uninspired suburbs where they are cut off from nature and other people—except for their dysfunctional families.

Most of these New Wave directors came of age in the politically uncertain period after the 1995 separatist referendum defeat, when the Quebec nationalist movement was deflated and rudderless. They later practised their art with the thriving Kino experimental short film movement.

Their films respond to the blistering speed of contemporary media and to the wave of crowd-pleasing, nostalgic Quebec films released to considerable commercial success in the past decade, such as La Grande Séduction, Les Boys 4, and C.R.A.Z.Y., which portray modern Quebec culture as homogenous, insular, and cheerfully Norman Rockwellian in its ability to resolve conflict. Three of the filmmakers—Fournier, Ouellet, and Giroux—spent the early part of their careers immersed in consumer culture making video clips and advertising. Côté was a well-known film critic notoriously contemptuous of mainstream box-office hits.

Still from 'Continental, un film sans fusil' (2008) directed by Stéphane Lafleur.

It’s as if these young filmmakers are collectively saying “let’s slow down a minute and really take a look at what’s going on in this culture.” In Continental, which was awarded the prize for best first feature at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2007, lonely people try to connect, but can’t. Chantal, a single woman invited to a party on a blind date, is so ill-at-ease she drops a squirming baby to the floor with a thud. Is it a comment on Quebec’s declining birthrate that a woman in her early 30s panics when she touches a baby? In an equally uncomfortable moment, Louis, the travelling salesman, is invited by the couple next door to him at the hotel to watch them have sex. Lonely, he agrees. In what feels like an interminable shot he sits observing them, with a Styrofoam cup of wine in his hand, completely unaroused. Embarrassed, he abruptly leaves, mumbling his thanks.

Still from 'Tout est parfait' (2008), directed by Yves-Christian Fournier.

Yves-Christian Fournier’s Tout est parfait probes the taciturn world of five adolescents who feel so alienated they make a collective suicide pact (suicide is the number one cause of death among men aged 20 to 40 in Quebec). Written by Guillaume Vigneault—son of Quebec’s unofficial national poet Gilles Vigneault—and nominated for seven Genies, Tout est parfait screened at festivals in Seattle, Namur, and Belgium and was awarded the Claude Jutra Prize for best first feature from the Canadian Academy of Film and Television.

Using footage he shot in rural, urban, and suburban Quebec, Fournier created a generic North American post-industrial city. The five friends attend a massive high school and pass their time smoking dope and aimlessly driving around. Lower middle-class, they are bright but poorly educated. And while all five speak Québécois French, two of the boys are of ambiguous ethnicity: one appears to be Central American, another Scandinavian, though we never learn their origins.

Fournier and cinematographer Sara Mishara—an exceptionally talented artist who also shot Continental and Demain—jolt the audience with visuals juxtaposing both the possibility and despair of youth. In the slow-moving opening scene, a smooth-faced adolescent boy sits on a bus filled with sunlight and blue sky. Before he gets off at his stop, he hands his iPod to a radiant young woman who smiles at him. A few moments later, he shoots himself in a graveyard. In the following scenes, Josh, the central character, discovers one of his friends hanging from his bedroom ceiling in a sequence that is so tightly shot and harsh that it’s claustrophobic. Throughout the film, Fournier highlights the cultural and spiritual poverty of their domestic lives: the dark bungalow with neglected, greasy kitchen cupboards where one boy lives with an alcoholic father; or the sterile dining rooms where families sit around the dinner table staring at each other in silence.

“As human beings we are confused,” Fournier told me when I spoke to him last spring, shortly before the Jutra Awards. The 36-year-old director believes that the complexity of modern life, including technology overload, environmental problems, and lack of spiritual guidance, overwhelms young people. “Thinking about these issues we are faced with brought to my mind a character who is feeling empty, although he is full,” Fournier says, referring to the lead character, Josh. “I wanted to explore that emptiness.”

Still from 'Derriere moi' (2008), directed by Rafaël Ouellet.

Derrière moi, which opened TIFF’s 2008 Vanguard section last year and A l’ouest de Pluton, which won the Special Jury Prize in the Narrative Features category at the 12th Bermuda International Film Festival, also portray the vulnerability of North American adolescents with exceptional clarity. In A l’ouest de Pluton, directors Henry Bernadet and Myriam Verreault recruited a group of 14- and 15-year-olds, all non-actors, from a Quebec suburban high school and followed them for a 24-hour period. While the film is scripted, much of the dialogue was improvised. The shots are long and the camera hand-held. The film’s central drama is a house party where an unpopular girl invites a group of fellow students to celebrate her birthday. A group of them trash the house, stealing the family pictures off the wall and throwing them in a field. One boy is violently beaten. Another girl is seduced by a young boy then abandoned by him after they have sex. The teenagers are wild and uncontrolled—overconfident, hypersexual, ignorant, greedy. Yet they also seem utterly lost, navigating new experiences without wisdom or the guidance of adults.

Derrière moi is a slow-moving, cynical tale of Betty, a prostitute who travels to a small town and recruits lonely 17-year-old Lea into prostitution. The seduction of Lea by Betty is the centre of this psychological drama, although the film is nearly plotless until the final scenes.

Shot in dark indoor settings, the film’s shadowed, grainy texture is at times like a B-horror film: Betty is a vampire, preying on Lea’s sexual energy and youthful innocence. Ouellet wrote Derrière moi because he’s interested in how young North American women are drawn into the sex trade. “I worked at MusiquePlus for seven years,” explains Ouellet. “I was responsible for trying to sell adolescents a lifestyle based on consuming the latest iPod and being like everyone else. But young people have so much curiosity and naiveté and idealism. With my films I want to try to show them something else.” As in A l’ouest du Pluton, in Derrière moi it appears that no one is around to protect the young.

While their stories are at times opaque and frustratingly slow-moving, what is remarkable about these New Wave films is their careful attention to the detail of character. Unlike the films of celebrated Quebec filmmakers such as Denis Villeneuve (Polytechnique, Maelström) and François Girard (The Red Violin), which feature exquisite images but often suffer from weak scripts, New Wave films are obsessively character-driven: the cameras meander through their stories, revealing nuanced emotions with facial expressions, body language and long, uncut sequences. And in contrast to the practised and frequently dogmatic cynicism of celebrated Québécois director Denis Arcand, the New Wave films compassionately (and often humorously) portray a society in the midst of a spiritual and social crisis.

The culture they evoke is an uneasy mixture of American excess and Nordic austerity. It seems utterly appropriate for this wintry nation that has somehow produced two of the splashiest, most commercial acts on the Las Vegas strip: Cirque du Soleil and Céline Dion. What’s not present in New Wave films is the warmth and easy-going chattiness—the so-called joie de vivre— that anglophone filmgoers often associate with Canada’s other solitude. And the backdrops of these stories aren’t the romantic historic neighborhoods tourists flock to see, but the dreary suburbs and small towns where most Quebecers—most North Americans—live.

Post-war Quebec was rigidly Catholic and conservative until well into the 1960s. Five decades ago, the large, rural Quebec family was promoted as the ideal. Along with the church, it was viewed as one of the central pillars of the nation. Today, Quebec has one of the lowest birth and marriage rates and one of the highest male suicide rates on the continent. Quebec has transformed from a highly religious culture, where community and church were central, to a highly urbanized, secular society with a deeply ingrained media culture in half a lifetime. It appears that this new generation of filmmakers are measuring the fallout of such rapid, irrevocable change. In the process, they have reached beyond the boundaries of their own culture to develop a cinematic language that is both universal and yet—if it’s not too loaded a term—distinct.

John Greyson, filmmaker and York University professor, posted this short film on his Vimeo site a few days ago. Greyson’s video has touched upon a spirit of creative resistance that has been present throughout many of the anti- or alter-globalization demonstrations of the past.

G20 leaders fight over the cheque. Copyright Oxfam 2008.

There was that time in 2001 when a group protesting the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City constructed a teddy bear catapult. Oxfam has repeatedly used giant papier mache heads to stage hilarious photos that carry a message (word has it, we’ll see those heads on the streets of Toronto when the G20 arrives,) and the odds are very good that come June, an army of rebel clowns will descend upon the city, possibly looking for tiny cars to pile into and then emerge from, (perhaps to illustrate how damaging car culture can be?)

Greyson’s call to arts is a nice reminder that the possibilities for actions of creative resistance are infinite.

The epic wars of the past between filmmakers and critics—Vincent Canby’s mano a mano with James Toback, James Cameron going cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs on any critic who looks at him funny, or the minor dustup that happened at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, in which a producer’s rep was punched in the face by critic John Anderson—are now few and far between. As German director Wim Wenders noted, “Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.” Why is that?

Recently, I met a Canadian director at a film festival and a few days later watched his film, a piece of work so appallingly awful that by the end of it I was physically angry. I wanted to hit someone or something. If this had been his directorial debut, I could have forgiven it, or at least had some greater amount of sympathy.

But it was only the last in a long line of terrible films, each one perfectly, utterly bad. Somehow, in nice Canadian fashion, this man was allowed to keep on keeping on, supported and helped along. “Someone ought to stop you,” I thought. “Lock you in a basement, tie you to a chair, take away your socks and shoes, anything, so you can never make another film again.”

Extreme? Perhaps. But you will notice I have not mentioned his name. If I write something scathing about a film, I will no doubt find myself at a party a few weeks later with said filmmaker. He might pop me in the eye.

The relationship between critics and filmmakers is too close, too cautious. In literary circles, a great many critics write under a nom de plume, merely to review work with some degree of impunity. This isn’t as easy in film circles. Mostly, I do my best to avoid the entire thing, and foster some type of mild to moderate misanthropia, just enough to discourage too much contact.

It would be a nice idea—pure and clean—if critics could be kept in a separate holding pen, secluded from the artist until they have rendered their verdict on a given film. Largely, that’s not possible. In Canada, the pool is about an inch deep, and barely two feet across. Juries, panels, and film festivals also add another layer of complication. It’s a small world.

Critics do form attachments, crushes or hate-ons for certain filmmakers, and it can affect their judgment. In Gerald Peary’s documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, the dual and dueling forces of Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael are offered up as the apotheosis of film-critic superstars. But even they were not immune to seductions of the famous and the talented. Kael especially was susceptible to director crushes, championing certain directors (Brian de Palma?!) despite her professed anti-auteur stance.

In independent film circles, which is where I spend the majority of my time, there are subtler ways of being swayed. When a filmmaker presents me with a screener of their precious baby, accompanied by a sad story of selling a kidney or turning street tricks in order to finance their film, I’m stuck. It takes an extremely hard heart to take a mewling scrawny film, made with blood, sweat, and other bodily fluids (but almost no money) and proceed to kick the crap out of it—even if that’s really what I ought to do. Cruel to be kind may be the best thing for everyone involved, but doing it in print can feel like murder by proxy. “Well, it’s not that bad, for a Canadian film,” I find myself thinking in some strange form of affirmative action. But the end result of this process is the example of the film director and his crappy oeuvre with which I began this story. In which case, I have only myself to blame.

Film critics are no longer what they once were. They are few and far between, for one thing. Mostly these days, film has reviewers, who puff and PR them in various media forms. Call them what you will—shills, liars for hire, ink-stained wretches—stuck between pages of advertisements, cramming their ideas and thoughts into word counts that are barely in the double digits.

And filmmakers are often myopic creatures. Like most artists, they don’t see much beyond the borders of their own ego. Everything—and I realize this is something of a sweeping statement, but bear with me for a moment—outside their current film tends to blur into a fuzzy featureless landscape.

That’s why I think filmmakers really need critics, not reviewers, bootlickers, or suck-ups. They need a firm hand, like that of a stern German nanny. An outside voice that will come in and say, “You’re capable of so much more.” Or, “Here is a whole bunch of ideas you should consider.” Or, in certain extreme cases: “You really ought to think about doing something else.”

On the cover of the May-June 2010 issue is Shawn Thompson‘s dispatch from Samboja Lestari, a controversial reforestation project in Borneo that aims to preserve orangutan populations, repair rainforests damaged by illegal logging, and support local farmers by fostering interdependence between the wildlife, forest, and people. Some say it could revolutionize conservation projects around the world; others aren’t convinced. Also in this issue: Lauren McKeon reports from Yellowknife on the shocking state of its prison, where lack of resources for psychiatric assessments has turned a whole wing of the facility into a de facto mental health ward. Stuck in legal limbo, the prisoners there wait—and then wait some more—for justice. And Patricia Bailey examines the work of a young crop of filmmakers who have come to be known as Quebec’s “new wave.” Eschewing the commercial, nostalgic hits of recent Quebec cinema, this new generation of directors and writers are embracing a stark aesthetic that illustrates the social alienation sweeping Canada’s Francophone province.

There’s lots more: Scott Weinstein calls out the  Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combaat Anti-Semitism; Andrea McDowell argues that we need better ways to counter misinformation about wind energy; Eva Salinas reports on the post-earthquake cleanup in Chile; Rob Thomas profiles a graffiti artist who ditched his toxic art supplies and started making his own eco-friendly paints; Darryl Whetter says Canadian Literature has become less feminist; Dorothy Woodend says the small size of Canada’s film community is hindering real criticism; and Dayanti Karunaratne investigates whether bamboo textiles  are really more environmentally friendly than their conventional counterparts.

PLUS: Gillian Bennett with tips on protesting the G20 in safety and style; Alex Consiglio on legendary pro-pot lawyer Alan Young; Lyndsie Bourgon on bike sharing programs; Anya Wassenberg on a U.S. Supreme Court battle between Ontario and Michigan over the future of the Great Lakes; Daniel Tseghay on the 50th anniversary of the “Year of Africa”; Graham F. Scott on the Harper government’s “women and children” agenda at the G8 and G20; Vivian Belik on minority governments; Jenn Hardy on Montreal band Po’ Girl; Chantaie Allick on Ottawa’s Snapdragon Gallery; Navneet Alang on how online communities throw together people who would never meet in real life, and more.

With a new short story by Jonathan Bennett and new poetry by Caroline Szpak.

The Trotsky resembles any number of previous high school comedies. Kid pisses off father, kid is sent to a new school as punishment, kid wins his way into the hearts of a new group of friends, kid unites school against a common enemy and becomes the hero of the day. Modify the formula slightly and you get Mean Girls, or Rushmore, or a host of other U.S. teen comedies.

Leon Bronstein (Jay Baruchel) speaks to E-Talk Daily in The Trotsky. Copyright Alliance Films.

There’s no doubt The Trotsky has big potential for mass appeal, but sneaking a little Canada (or a lot) into the film hasn’t seemed to hurt it. And Canada isn’t just present in the form of its Montreal backdrop. Colm Feore, who’s had his fair share of acclaim north and south of the border and who plays the villainous Principal Berkoff in the The Trotsky, muses that “The Canadian-ness of this film is our genius for subversion while playing it straight…The gags are layered in. There are political statements under the political statements.”

Mainstream and underground films produced in both English and French Canada seem to be moving away from the brand of canned Canadiana that marked the industry for decades, instead embracing a more self-assured tone—but one that, being Canadian, whispers rather than shouts.

The success of the Fantasia festival in Montreal (which runs for almost three weeks in July), Toronto After Dark and the Calgary Underground Film Festival (now in its fifth year) indicates a growing level of interest, acceptance and even love for the form. But whether this is a good or bad thing usually depends on whether you were a fan before mainstream acceptance. In this post-Tarantino age, it’s getting damn hard to find very much that is truly underground any longer. Cult cinema ain’t what it used to be.

Isaac Alexander, who contributes to different science-fiction blogs and worked with the Seattle-based anime convention Sakura-Con, says, “When I grew up, I was a part of school clubs devoted toward science fiction/fantasy and anime. These clubs provided the ‘distribution’ to discover video programming from distant lands,” says Isaac. “Now, you just need to load up the internet and head to YouTube.”

Kier-La Janisse, who founded Vancouver’s infamous (and now defunct) horror film festival CineMuerte, pulls no punches in her assessment of this phenomenon: “I think the mainstream always comes knocking when anything underground proves to be viable to some degree, regardless of genre. Then they rip off the ideas of all the real pioneers, the people who took all the chances to prove that these types of films could work.”

She adds that a true aficionado is someone who works to locate low-quality versions of these titles. “When I want to watch Messiah of Evil or something, I watch a crappy VHS of it. I need the specialness—otherwise you’re just a consumer.”

A consequence of this contradiction is that films that do very well at bigger festivals like Fantasia or Toronto After Dark often err on the lighter side of the darkness. A case in point is an Austrian film called On Evil Grounds, which has screened in multiple festivals including the Calgary Underground Film Festival and Fantasia. On Evil Grounds is very much like a Tex Avery horror film (for those who don’t know the man, he was the looniest of the Looney Tunes animators). Bodily fluids erupt everywhere, and one doesn’t know whether to laugh or throw up. Maybe both. Since it is made for people to hoot and holler at, the film was a massive success at festivals.

Of course, festivals cannot live on love alone; you still need funding, and bums in seats. Certainly there is devotion from committed fans, the occasional bit of critical respect, even money. Well, sometimes. Bill C-10 is only the latest offensive that critics fear will deny tax dollars to films that are excessively violent without an educational value. You can have your bloody mayhem, but there better be a lesson buried at its centre. Despite the increased visibility and popularity of genre cinema, the festivals that program it don’t get much help from the Canadian government.

Try explaining to the Canada Council the educational benefit of films that depict maniacs hacking up boobalicious teenagers, and you get the picture. Or maybe you don’t, since many films simply don’t get shown. Brenda Lieberman, who runs the Calgary Underground Film Festival, says, “People often stereotype horror fans, which makes it less likely for sponsors to jump in.” CUFF has been growing slowly over the past five years, but the festival still struggles to break even, balancing more obscure offerings with crowd-pleasers.

If you really want to see weird stuff or, worse, show weird stuff to other people, you still have to do it yourself. I think it’s time I started a film festival.

Noam Chomsky in "Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy"

If ever there was a conspiracy theory that had every likelihood of being true, it’s that a shadowy cabal of billionaires are meeting at some remote location in the Swiss Alps (perhaps the Hotel Mont Pelerin, or the latest Bilderberg stronghold) to plot how to most effectively screw the rest of the world. Michael Moore’s new film Capitalism: A Love Story may have garnered the most attention this season for taking aim at the secret practices and predations of the super wealthy, but recently, an entire swathe of films has appeared that shine the light on the moneyed elite and their economic empire.

Erwin Wagenhofer’s Let’s Make Money, Leslie Cockburn’s American Casino, Renzo Martens’ Episode 3—Enjoy Poverty, Kevin Stocklin’s We All Fall Down, and Richard Brouillette’s three hour epic Encirclement: Neo-Liberalism Ensnares Democracy have all been released within the past year, and have popped up at film festivals around the globe.

Although this glut might appear to be a reaction to the current global money meltdown, many of the films were many years in the making—especially Brouillette’s, which took more than 12 years to create. That they should all should emerge roughly at the same time is serendipitous. (Or maybe it speaks to some even larger invisible hand at work.)

The one percent (or less) of the population that comprise the wealthiest demographic on the planet are different from the rest of us. Perhaps, much like the poor, they’ve always been with us, but never before in the history of human society has the entire collected wealth of the world, been so densely concentrated. How exactly did it come to be?

It may a simple enough question, but the answers are Byzantine in their complexity. There is simply too much to know, too many details filling the air with smoke and flying pieces of paper.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Brouillette’s film Encirclement, which is not even really so much a film as a lecture series. Even the title sounds like a treatise. All the same, if you can keep your eyes propped open, it may be one of the most chilling films in recent memory.

The film is divided into chapters, which is actually the best way to watch it. Take in some information, then go have a cup of tea before you dive back into dense stuff like “Chapter 8: Neo-Liberalism or Neo-Colonialism? Strong-Arm Tactics of the Financial Markets,” in which Noam Chomsky demonstrates the ability of financial power brokers to make global political decisions.

As the varied talking heads lay out exactly how neo-liberalism sacrificed public good for private profit and economic meltdown resulted, a shadow world is revealed in which real power, pooled in liquidities and off-shore reserves, is massaged and manipulated by an army of financiers, analysts, and grey-suited think-tanks. This shadow government surpasses all borders and agencies, and ultimately serves only one master. If you were about to say Satan, you’re not far wrong. It’s the bottom line.

The one thing watching all of these films en masse can do is at least clear up any residual or lingering uncertainty about “us” and “them.” The rich are definitely out to get us, and they have the means (be it private security firms, or the entire American army) and the methodology (untaxable offshore bank accounts housed in the Isle of Guernsey) to do it.

But against such a gargantuan world-eating monstrosity, what can one possibly do, except—as in a bear attack—roll over and play dead?

I wish I had better answers, but after plowing through three hours of Encirclement, I felt utterly outflanked, outgunned and outmaneuvered. I’m sure most people would feel the same. The film does not end on an upbeat note; rather, the completeness of its argument squelches hope of resistance.

But before we collectively offer up our soft underbellies to the devouring maw, stop and think. Brouillette’s own stated intent for his documentary was to make “A film about mind-control, brainwashing, ideological conformism; about the omnipresent irrefutability of a new monotheism, with its engraved commandments, burning bushes and golden calves.”

Which all sounds rather biblical, but in the war against Mammon, perhaps, the symbolism is apt. The sense of religious convergence is similar to that of the conspiracy theory. The moment when you step over from denial to acceptance, and begin to believe that there is a bigger truth out there, everything shifts. In this guerrilla campaign, information is a weapon.

Documentaries, bless their stubborn contrary hearts, continue to be one of the few media forms that still squeak and squawk. Everything else has pretty much been bought up, silenced or infantilized into blithering stupidity (yes, I’m looking at you, mainstream media). Arm yourself with facts and arguments. Don’t trust anyone, especially not a man in a suit. Bankers, brokers, or real estate agents, are all in on it.

There’s a reason they call it free thinking. It may be the last free thing around.

Tell us your favourite Joy Division song to win two tickets to Friday's screening of "Joy Division" from Images Festival.

Our friends at Images Festival have very nicely given us two passes to the screening of Grant Gee’s documentary Joy Division, screening this Friday, February 5, 2010 in Toronto. So, in order to make sure the swag goes to a true JD fan, we’re asking you to leave a comment below naming your favourite Joy Division song. We’ll collect all the entries and pick someone at random to get the tickets. The Guardian called the documentary “a must-see” in their 2007 review:

This is a very powerful and moving film that perhaps goes deeper than Control in exploring the full reasons for [Ian] Curtis’s suicide…. There are no actors or recreations. There are no twists for dramatic effect. It’s all vividly real. […] Two full days after seeing Joy Division, the documentary, it’s difficult to shake off the impact of some of the interviews, or the feeling that this story is ongoing, in all of us, in the lives of people left behind, many of whom are only starting to understand what happened with the benefit of age and experience.

We’ve seen it, by the way, and it is every bit as fantastic as it sounds. And now you can see it on us! Click through to leave your comment and enter. The Rules:

1. To enter, leave a comment below naming your favourite Joy Division song.
2. One entry per person — in other words, multiple comments don’t get you more chances to win. That said, feel free to advocate for your song or convince others of its awesomeness. Banter!
3. The draw will close on Thursday, February 4, 2010, at noon, EST. We’ll draw the winner Thursday afternoon.
4. Make sure we have a way of contacting you — in other words, sign in with Twitter or Facebook, or make sure you leave your real email address (which won’t be visible to, or shared, with anyone else!)

It's easy to be cynical about awards season, but a chance to promote quality is still valuable. Illustration by David Donald.

If you ever want to get your hands on an Oscar, you’ll probably have to earn it the hard way. Security is tight on those things, and the resale market starts at $50,000 and heads into the seven-figure bracket if the winner was anyone you’ve heard of. (Michael Jackson once paid over $1.5 million for Gone with the Wind’s Best Picture award.) If you’re not at all picky about your statuettes and don’t mind owning one that looks like an Oscar minus its arms and with an extra ass for a head, you could always go for a Genie. (Resale value is negligible unless it once belonged to Al Waxman.)

The annual giving of hardware is actually the culmination of several months’ worth of prognostication, deliberation, and dispensation of less glamorous awards. This period— which can stretch from early December all the way into March—is “awards season” in the movie business. It’s when the average moviegoer is suddenly supposed to really, really care about film as an artistic medium, irrespective of the hype, lies, and misleading marketing schemes she’s routinely fed for the rest of the year. It’s the time when we learn a lot about the films that are supposed to represent the medium’s highest achievement, even though most of us gain this knowledge only to better our chances in office Oscar betting pools.

It’s easy to be cynical about awards season and its rituals. (Unless, of course, you have a direct stake in one of the movies bound for victory. This year, Precious, Up in the Air, and Clint Eastwood’s Invictus are among the early faves.) After all, studios spend millions on “for your consideration” advertising, events, dinners, and everything else they do to help position their films as deserving. That includes courting the various critics organizations in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, giving hacks who spend the rest of their year fretting over newspaper bankruptcies a brief taste of power and influence. For one brief flickering moment, it’s as if their opinions matter.

This feeling may be the main reason that anyone takes part in the shadowy processes that yield awards. And while even these participants might complain about the ever-swelling glut of prizes, citations, and Top 10 lists, on some level they know that this might be the only means to let the world know about what matters to them, especially when it comes to movies as an art form.

Speaking as a critic, I can say that opinion-making by jury or consensus—and not individual reviewers—is already the norm. Whereas a rave by Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert may have once put asses in seats, now most movies live or die by their user-generated ratings on the Internet Movie Database or the aggregated scores of reviews as tabulated by the geek wizards at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.

To participate in a vote for a prize or a list—like Canada’s Top Ten, a worthy initiative by the Toronto International Film Festival group to create a more valuable guide to the year’s finest homegrown efforts, than the more industry oriented and often baffling Genies—almost concedes how little the individual critic’s voice matters. As for the moviegoer, the prizes and the lists have become another means of managing all the unruly streams of information, opinion, and invective pouring in from every direction. It’s a filtering of data that tells us the important books we’re supposed to read, the essential music we’re supposed to hear, the must-see movies we must see. All of these comprise what used to be called the mainstream and disparaged accordingly by snobs like me. Lately, it feels like an increasingly futile effort to construct some sort of fluctuating canon of Things Worth Caring About in an ever more fractionalized and factionalized culture. Prizes and lists reassure us that it’s not too late to impose some degree of order. Somehow, somewhere there’s a panel of experts who’ve done the hard thinking and decreed that, yes, the state of art is better than fine, it’s great (and here’s another masterpiece in case you were worried).

To believe that such an endeavour has value might be as naive as believing the Best Picture Oscar actually goes to the year’s best picture. (Remember: they gave one of those to Chicago.) But if three more people went to see Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy or Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg— the best feature and best Canadian feature of 2008 according to the Toronto Film Critics Association, of which I’m a member—because of stupid awards, then maybe it’s worth the trouble.