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Goin Down The Road Film Analysis

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Melody Kia UCSB 2010 Goin Down the Road and Double Happiness Imagine yourself as not belonging in your own home, never feeling that you belong. The films’ “Canadian-ness” lies in the way the characters and cultural types are expressed in the cinematic features such as the narrative, characterization, setting, dialogue, mise-en-scene and the lighting of both films. Both of these films present main characters searching to find the Canadian dream of success, but are faced with the limitations of their own backgrounds that expose the films’ Canadian styling’s. The main characters in Goin Down the Road (dir. Shebib, 1970) and Double Happiness (dir. Shum, 1994) are all foreigners in their own country and the Canadian narrative brings this out. …show more content…

As Christine Ramsay points out in Canadian Narrative Cinema from the Margins: ‘The Nation’ and Masculinity in Goin Down the Road, many critiques saw the film as portraying “Canadian men … always imagined as victims and losers.” This in and of itself would seem to fit the Canadian thematic representation of men, such as Max Renn (James Woods) in Videodrome (dir. David Cronenberg, 1983) who actually was successful at the beginning of the film, but ruined his life and fell to the bottom of society through his sexual perversions and killed himself. But, in Goin Down the Road, the characters are moderately successful in their Maritimer hometown and seek further success in Toronto, the big city. Their problem is rooted in their lack of education and despite their drive to succeed they fail

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