Last Night (1998) | Sufi Mohamed

Canada's film industry is marked by an enveloping Hollywood influence, making it difficult for Canada to achieve its unique identity. In this struggle to gain independence from Hollywood's entertainment apparatus, Canada is lost among countless identification systems. These identification systems have confused Canada's film industry and resulted in numerous films such as Don McKellar's Last Night. As a Canadian film striving to identify with Hollywood's entertainment apparatus, Don McKellar's Last Night uses a recognisable Canadian style, tone and themes. It identifies itself, in the broader sense, against Hollywood.
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Don McKellar's Last Night tells how various characters spend their remaining evenings on Earth. The world is to end at midnight due to a calamity that is not explained but has been expected for several months. (For example, "It's not the end of the world… there's still six hours left." Several scenes of a glowing sun, which gets progressively larger and brighter, imply that the world's end results from a celestial event, possibly a supernova. Last Night details the previous six hours of Earth's existence with humour, irony, and pathos. With the unspecified apocalypse long since announced, the film's characters move beyond initial blinding panic and settle into an uneasy resignation about their imminent demise. This occurs at midnight. Instead of looting and pillaging, most citizens celebrate their final day as if it were New Year's Eve. Director Don McKellar weaves together the stories of a handful of characters with a sardonic eye for the absurd. The film's starkly existential situation achieves moments of profound poignancy, particularly during the film's (and the Earth's) final moments.
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This film is Canadian for its intense use of the direct cinema tradition and style. Last Night methodically explains the events as the cameras observe human interactions and behaviours. To represent a country bereft of a direct relationship with Hollywood's media apparatus, Last Night deploys a unique differentiation system that isolates itself from Hollywood's influence. Don McKellar uses lengthy track shots, meditative camera angles interlaced with soft zooms and strategic crane shots. McKellar successfully captures the essence of human fragility as the camera angles and shots complement the interaction between each character. McKellar uses a soft camera stylistic feature that contributes to many emphatic relational developments between the viewer and the protagonist. For example, McKellar draws empathy from the audience through slow camera angles near the ending sequence. This depicts Patrick (played by Don McKellar) and Sandra (played by Sandra Oh) about to commit suicide. It is this relationship that distinguishes Canadian cinematography. Central in this difference between Hollywood's highly stylised camera shots and the observational inquiry lens of Don McKellar's Last Night is critical in Canadian cinema analysis. Last Night captures Canadian cinematic traditions.
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In a broader sense, Last Night also follows a Canadian tone of realism. McKellar draws on humanity rather than epic explosion displays similar to Armageddon. Unlike big-budget Hollywood films such as Deep Impact or Armageddon, whose spectacle coincides with attractive displays of monetary enjoyment, Don McKellar's Last Night uses an approach that focuses on human compassion. In cinema, a movie's tone refers to its manner of presentation and the general atmosphere that a filmmaker creates through their attitude toward the story (Giannetti, Louis, Leach, Jim, 2005). McKellar uses a countdown system that repeats near the end of the world, creating a tone of imminent catastrophe—the final confrontation with the end of everything. Through this tone, McKellar effectively represents Canada's ideological values rather than Hollywood's heroic fantasies. Don McKellar describes the style as The world is ending again. However, this time, in the movie, no overburdened loner dukes it out with the asteroid. No presidents or generals turn the tables on extra-terrestrials. Those heroes are out there, somewhere, one hopes, but he was interested in the rest of us suckers—hapless individuals who, with limited access to nuclear resources, would have to come to terms with the fast-approaching finale (IndieWire). With this undertaking, McKellar's tone evolves beyond asteroids' spectacle and affects our responses to his values. McKellar's narrative is distinctively Canadian because of his creative way of dividing the scenes in a way that makes sense among his various characters. In particular, McKellar's tone is heightened as he explains that because the world is ending, individuals attempt to face the inevitable through prayer and meditation. They engage in prolific sexual gratifications, stealing, and violent enjoyment. Also, McKellar emphasises unavoidable companionship (Patrick and Sandra kissing at the film's end) through dialogue, short silences, and careful insertions of love songs. Dialogue is a particular asset that Canadian cinema possesses (Egoyan, 2006, 5). McKellar's tone is distinctively Canadian in that he portrays, instead of spectacular displays of imminent catastrophe, dialogue that emphasises a firm style. This creates empathy and engages the audience with the characters.

Don McKellar's Last Night achieves another distinctive ideological theme. While Hollywood focuses on materialist heroic and delusional fantasies, Canadian cinema focuses on narrative article presentation. For instance, Armageddon was released on a $140 million budget, while Last Night was produced with a $2 million budget. Hollywood releases like Armageddon aim to achieve high revenues from the film's success rather than developing a critical outlook towards concepts that have had a long-standing influence on society, such as the end of the world. McKellar's Canadian film Last Night emphasizes human companionship. The intimacy of human relationships becomes a central concern for McKellar as he attempts to answer the daunting question: "What happens to people when confronted with the end of the world?" In McKellar's attempt to answer this question, he projects a different image of the end of the world as a moment that ends in a blinding light rather than a consuming darkness. Weiland states that "nature (or realism) is a influence in the construction and understanding of a binding Canadian cinematic aesthetic" (63), placing McKellar's analysis on a fictional, although realistic, interpretation regarding the end of the world, unlike Armageddon.
Don McKellar uses meditative camera work to present a thought-provoking critique of the end of the world. McKellar's analysis finds that people not only panic and fear the end of the world. They also look at the background issues by individually assessing unique individuals who seek to end their lives in multiple ways. McKellar takes the lead as Patrick, a troubled man who has to deal with his family (including sister Polly), sex-crazed friend Craig (Rennie), and lost lamb Sandra (Oh). Sandra is trying to get home in time so she and her husband can kill each other before midnight when the world goes away (in a mysterious fate). The connection between these characters is evident in the final confrontation at the end of the world. However, how they spend their time until they encounter the end of the world differs, and they each embody a theme. As a Canadian film, Last Night demonstrates Canadian themes and expresses Canada's intent to establish thematic representations of human interaction rather than material fantasies.
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McKellar's Last Night focuses on the struggle for autonomy in the Hollywood-dominated film industry. Hollywood's overarching influence reduces Canada's chances of domestic and international success to a dull halt. Like many, Straw (2000) asserts, "The sense that English Canadian feature films are typically more elliptical, unresolved, and restrained in narrative and stylistic terms is commonplace within discussions of this cinema" (120). In this way, Last Night encapsulates the unresolved issue of a mysterious fate. Everyone asks This troubling question regarding the world's end and humanity's future. However, Giannetti and Leach (2005) explain that "Hollywood films continue to dominate screens" (326).
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Consequently, these engagements with Hollywood have "apparently universal appeal and [have] set the norms against which other national cinemas define themselves" (Giannetti, Leach, 2005, 326). Don McKellar's Last Night follows a distinctively Canadian style because it attempts to define conventional Hollywood heroism delusions. Furthermore, McKellar creates a cinematic presentation of identification against Hollywood productions, which express "different experiences that reflect and express different cultural identities" (Giannetti, Leach, 2005, 326). These "distinct cultural identities" come in the form of particular styles, tones, and themes aforementioned above. These aspirations of reaching a unique Canadian identity are "complicated by political, economic, and technological changes that have deeply affected our understanding of national identity" (Giannetti, Leach, 2005, 328). Among the network sphere of Hollywood and its influence on Canada's national identity, McKellar's Last Night revisits Canadian values and themes. This is done to heighten the appeal of the end-of-the-world outcomes. With a small budget, McKellar faced a lot of economic struggle to strategically maintain assets and distribution of $2 million. However, in the final product, Last Night revealed a world of opportune moments for Canada's national identity. Despite a successful result, Atom Egoyan notes that "Canadian films are, to a significant extent, foreign films in their own country" (1); similarly, Giannetti and Leach (2005) observe that:

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When Canadians see the products of their national cinema, they often respond as if these were foreign films with unfamiliar conventions and cultural values. Canadian video stores often find Canadian films in the 'international' section. (Giannetti, Leach, 2005, 330).

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Quite literally, Don McKellar's Last Night can be found in the "International" section of a Blockbuster rental outlet. Consequently, Egoyan noted that "the real failure of Canadian film policy is that it has not been able to address the debilitating problem of the lack of screen space for Canadian films" (6). Egoyan explains that the Canadian market needs more time slots for Canadian films. Canadian film is celebrated in Vancouver and Ontario (Giannetti, Leach, 2005, 328). Therefore, McKellar's Last Night did not receive its intended audience due to a lack of screen space for Canadian films. This is because Canadian cinemas needed to be more confident of their success. However, Armageddon was released because of the increased probability of its overall success. McKellar's Last Night attempts to identify against Hollywood's influence by inverting the cultural values of a successful Hollywood film (i.e. instead of spectacle and explosions, McKellar uses a calm and realistic approach to how ordinary people face the end of the world). As Giannetti and Leach (2005) noted, McKellar's film attempts to assert its national cinema by identifying itself against Hollywood cinema. This concept of Canadian identification is at the heart of a distinctively Canadian film.
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Don McKellar's Last Night brings Canada's cultural values and identity to life. McKellar's unique approach characterizes Canadian film style, tone and themes. Without spectacle, McKellar illustrates a dynamic environment of human companionship, a distinctively Canadian system. As an artefact, Last Night commemorates the identification value of a famous Canadian cultural icon because McKellar attempts to define against Hollywood cinema the intent of Canada's national cinemas from their upbringing.

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Bibliography

Egoyan, Atom. (2006). “Introduction to Canadian Cinema.” In Jerry White, ed. The Cinema of Canada. New York: Wallflower. 1-13.

Giannetti, Louis, Leach, Jim (2005). Third Canadian Edition: Understanding Movies. Toronto: Prentice Hall.

“Interview: ‘Last Night,’ Don McKellar’s Intimate Armageddon.” (1998). IndieWire: People. Accessed 23 March 2007<http://www.indiewire.com/people/intMcKellarDon_991108.html>.

Last Night. (Don McKellar, 1998). Canada: Lions Gate Home Entertainment.

Missen, James. (2006). “Reason over Passion.” In Jerry White, ed. The Cinema of Canada. New York: Wallflower. 63-73.

Straw, Will. (2000). “Canadian Cinema.” In Hill, John and Gibson, Pamela Church, ed. World Cinema: Critical Approaches. New York: Oxford University Press. 139-143

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