Vancouver Dispatch

For all its natural beauty, Vancouver is famously non-descript in the numerous Hollywood movies that shoot here on the cheap, invariably relegating the city to a stand-in for Anytown, USA (recent examples include the X-Men films, Firewall, The Exorcism of Emily Rose and the remake of The Fog).

While the locals rather like having movie stars in their midst (and you can be sure the local media resent their absence from VIFF), there is something belittling about this enforced anonymity. Gallingly, Hollywood is making jokes about it: "Why would we want to shoot in Vancouver?" someone rails in the pilot for Aaron Sorkin's new show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. "Vancouver doesn't look like anywhere. Vancouver doesn't even look like Vancouver".

Well, Vancouver never looked more like itself than in Everything's Gone Green, based on the first original narrative screenplay by the novelist and multi-media artist Douglas Coupland. Coupland is Vancouver born and bred, and several of his books take place in the immediate vicinity (Life After God, Girlfriend in a Coma and Hey Nostradamus!, for starters); he even wrote a typically gnomic A-Z of his hometown, City of Glass.

Everything's Gone Green might be City of Glass: The Movie for the way it goes out of its way to foreground the location. It even begins with a bike ride around the Seawall. But this is not mere travelogue; Coupland is exploring the way the environment conditions a certain culture, in this case a psyche of west coast capitalism that is at once attractively laid back and morally inert (not to say corrupt).


Posted by: Edwin    Source