Oh! Hello. I know, right? Like the blind squirrel who eventually finds the broken clock twice a day, Josh has finally stumbled onto someone interesting and relevant. And it only took him 29 completely useless Canadian culture blogposts to do it! Great job, Josh. Your certificate in pointless knowledge is in the mail, as are the medals for everyone who’s been bored to tears by this Canadian culture crapfest for the past seven months.

Oh, and speaking of people who look like squirrels: Do NOT confuse Ryan Reynolds with that chunk of cardboard Ryan Gosling! Urgh, I really hate that! Just because they’re both scruffily bearded Ryans from Canada, people actually think they’re the same person!  That’s…..some kind of…..racism, or something!

*sigh* OK. The point is, my boy Ryan has had to put up with a lot of horse puckey before Hollywood would let him be the voice of an electrically-powered mouse-familiar wearing a detective hat. Everybody knows about his seizure-inducing turns in X-Men Origins, Green Lantern, and Blade: Trinity, but I bet you forgot that he was in a remake of The Amityville Horror where they had him aggressively chop wood and walk around shirtless. Then, he got verbally abused for laughs by Sandra Bullock in The Proposal.

Even Sesame Street had its way with him! They had him dress up in a letter A costume with his face poking out of a hole! Get it? He was an A-hole!

Even when he finally got to play me the right way, I spent most of the movies getting my ass kicked in humorous ways and have people lecture me about when I was going to take some responsibility, or go through some kind of traditional character arc, or fight an actual villain instead of someone as morally compromised as I was. All this, while that idiot Gosling gets to walk away with a Best Actor statue and giggle like a goof when they screwed up the Best Picture envelope opening.

Damn you, Gosling! You had negative chemistry with Rachel McAdams in “The Notebook”, but that’s what happens when you cast two Canadians as your romantic leads in an American WWII love story. Don’t they realize that Reynolds embody the qualities of all the Canadian actors we’ve discussed throughout this series? The vulnerability of Donald Sutherland, the goofiness of William Shatner, the boundary-breaking comedy of Carrey and Myers, and the regular-guy façade and deadpan sarcasm of Norm MacDonald and Leslie Nielsen?

Even when you think about me – another superhero with Canadian origins, by the by – you realize that my fourth-wall-breaking antics are perfectly suited to the primordial chaos of Canadian culture. I’m described as “living cancer”, and I’m unable to conform to any conventions of “story “, heroism, or villainy. I barely have a secret identity, and gets confused variously for Wolverine (whose healing factor was injected into me), Spider-Man (my creator, Rob Liefeld, deliberately modelled me on the wall-crawling web-slinger) and DC Comics mercenary Slade Wilson/Deathstroke (whose name actually inspired my real name, Wade Wilson). I’m unbelievably violent and powerful, but since I’m not as imposing as other superheroes and spend so much time getting pummeled I inspire laughter and sympathy rather than fear and revulsion.

Hmmm, wow. That was surprisingly deep, for me. Probably going to need that looked at. Oh well. Let’s close with a classic clip from Tom Green, who didn’t make it into last week’s episode on grotesque Canadian comedy (because it’s Tom Green)

(Hey, Josh here again. What the heck was all that about? Anyway, we’re coming to the end of the portion of our series that deals with Canadian actors, and we’ll move back into Canadian music afterwards. Next week we’ll dive back into the fun world of identity politics to answer the question of why Canadian women and minority actors struggle for recognition at home.)

*****

See the previous installments in the series:

Part 1 on Heroes: ‘Scott Pilgrim Vs The World’ Vs Terrance Denby and ‘Sidequest’

Part 2 on “Humour”: The Libertarian Fantasy of ‘Letterkenny’

Part 3 on Graphic Novel Nihilism: The Harsh Truths of ‘Essex County’

Part 4 on Spawn and Wolverine: Banished From The Promised Land: A Tale of Two Canadian Anti-Heroes

Part 5 on Science Fiction Dystopias: Inside Quebec’s – and Canada’s – Replicant Culture

Part 6 on Animation: The Garrison Mentality: More Than Meets The Eye

Part 7 on Pop Music: How To Build A Successful Canadian Musical Act

Part 8 on Anne of Green Gables and The Traumatized Artist: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Treacherous Alpine Path

Part 9 on Avoiding the Serious: Mordecai Richler, Montreal, And Gritty Realism

Part 10 on Southern Ontario Gothic: The Marriage of the Mundane and the Fantastic

Part 11 on Margaret Atwood’s Reign of Terror: Literary Tyranny and The Handmaid’s Tale

Part 12 on the First Nations Fraud: Whitewashing Genocide: Truth, Lies, and Joseph Boyden

Part 13 on the inventive Esi Edugyan: A Novel I Cannot Recommend Enough

Part 14 on Generation X Origins: Douglas Coupland And The Hopeful (?) Future Of Canadian (?) Culture

Part 15 on Jordan Peterson Rising: Canadian Culture Creators And The Intellectual Dark Web

Part 16 on The Awkward Quiet: David Cronenberg’s Silent Hell

Part 17 on The Saddest Music In The World: Guy Maddin’s Surrealist Madness

Part 18 on Ararat: Atom Egoyan’s Stammering Grief

Part 19 on Paul Haggis’ Superficial Gloss: Promising More Than He Delivers

Part 20 on the Reitman Family’s Blissful Ignorance: Space to Laugh an Easy Laugh

Part 21 on Mary Pickford: The Archetypal (Canadian) Actress

Part 22 on the Modern Prospero Christopher Plummer: As Blue-Blooded and Upper Canadian as They Come

Part 23 on Donald Sutherland: Grit Personified

Part 24 on Leslie Nielsen: The Funniest Thing in a Movie Where Jokes are Delivered Almost Every Minute

Part 25 on William Shatner: Faking It Until He Made It

Part 26 on The Trouble of “Story”: Story Wars: Canadians and the Star Trek vs. Star Wars Battle

Part 27 on Norm MacDonald’s Controlled Chaos: The Holy Fool Personified

Part 28 on the Culture of Newfoundland and Labrador: Long May Your Big Jib Draw!

Part 29 on The Grotesque In Canadian Comedy: Mike Myers and Jim Carrey

****

Photo by Gage Skidmore

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