Down With Hollywood! Long Live Hollywood!

Hugo Chavez, the much-despised "dictator" of Venezuela, has decided his country needs its own film-making division, and he's made his government the number one investor of Telesur, their new studio.

Naturally, a schwack of politicos in the US are shouting "Propaganda! Propaganda!" and claiming it's really just going to be a mouthpiece for Chavez. Typical. Fucking (right-wing) Americans.

The problem with some of these Fucking American politicians is that they fail to see themselves through the rest of the world. The rest of us may like American movies, but we sure as fuck don't want ONLY American movies to devour. For us, movies are culture, and not just entertainment.

Canada, for instance, makes very different movies from the United States. Ironically, our most successful movie of all time has been Porky's, but it doesn't really speak to Canadian content much. No, our more loved movies include things like Highway 61 and Last Night (in which the newly popular Sandra Oh has a great role) and The Sweet Hereafter and The Red Violin.

Canadian film, much like its literature, has a tendency to be contemplative, deep, quirky, odd, and passionate. We're a nation of writers, with the highest per-capita amount of writers in the world, and our cinema proves it. Much of Canadian film is odd and hard to swallow. Last Night, for instance, is a brilliant film in which everyone has known for more than six months that the world is going to end at 12:01 that night. It's a film about how a select few people choose to meet the end and how they spend those precious last hours. The thing is, you never, ever find out why the world is ending, or how. This was the movie my friends and I chose to watch on New Year's Eve, 1999.

Our movies may never pack American theatres full, they may never be seen beyond our borders, and it may even take months for us to find out about them ourselves, but I'm glad as hell the government sponsors Canadian movies and that they still get made. They speak to who we are and how we're different from Americans, and in an age where borders keep getting increasingly blurred (yet not, given the recent movement of troops along the Mexican border and the reality that Canadians will need passports to enter America in a year or so) it's crucial that our cultural differences not only be celebrated, but actively preserved.

And if Chavez is realizing it's time to protect his own nation's culture, then I say right fucking on, Hugo.

It's amusing yet tragic that American talking heads think a reluctance to allow American media be our (enter nation of choice here) media as some kind of Anti-American demonstration. They should get the fuck over themselves. America is not us. America will never, ever be us. And most of us are pretty happy about that. We celebrate our differences, but with media turning this floating ball into a global village instead of a patchwork of cultures, it's crucial each of us do everything we can to preserve our differences.

Producing media's extremely expensive. We've discovered the hard way that, given the choice between creating media or simply paying a fee to Americans to rerun theirs, most of our nations are too cheap to invest in it. If it means that governments need to make funds available and have processes of approval through which funds are dispersed to make nationalistic works, then so fucking be it. The alternative is that Hollywood will have a greater cultural stranglehold on the world than they already do.

In the age of fucking Britney Spears and bad movies, nothing scares me more.

*In light of the first comment, my general reference to "Americans" up there shouldn't be such a generalisation -- I'm meaning the dickheads who think like this, the myopic far-right right-wing, not Americans as a whole.

My favourite anti-American-attitude rant of mine is here. It's about a select group of butthead Americans travelling abroad and pretending to be Canadian, a growing trend that we really FUCKING hate.