The second best Canadian movie of all time. (The best is Going Down the Road.) Here is why Hard Core Logo ranks so high:
1. It moves. Canadian movies in general are terribly, terribly slow. Hard Core Logo is 100 miles per hour.
2. It deals with places/contexts that other Canadian movies don't, i.e., it is not about growing up in a small town.
3. The heroes, although they are in a band, aren't a group of teenagers trying to make it big. They are "grown-ups," at least in terms of years on the planet. Their struggle, their demons aren't glossy.
4. This is existential stuff. The main characters' struggles aren't confined to the world of music, or to a small sub-culture of it. Pigeonholing the movie as a music movie or as a comedy in the style of Spinal Top misses what is really going on here. This isn't a comedy, not even a black comedy (which is usually code for a comedy that isn't funny.) Instead, here you get to see Sisyphus -- right at the top of the mountain.
1. It moves. Canadian movies in general are terribly, terribly slow. Hard Core Logo is 100 miles per hour.
2. It deals with places/contexts that other Canadian movies don't, i.e., it is not about growing up in a small town.
3. The heroes, although they are in a band, aren't a group of teenagers trying to make it big. They are "grown-ups," at least in terms of years on the planet. Their struggle, their demons aren't glossy.
4. This is existential stuff. The main characters' struggles aren't confined to the world of music, or to a small sub-culture of it. Pigeonholing the movie as a music movie or as a comedy in the style of Spinal Top misses what is really going on here. This isn't a comedy, not even a black comedy (which is usually code for a comedy that isn't funny.) Instead, here you get to see Sisyphus -- right at the top of the mountain.