FRI, FEB 28
Shorts / 7 pm
Crime Wave / 8:30 pm
Featuring an introduction and Q&A with writer Jonathan Ball and director John Paizs. Copies of the book will be available for sale.
Writer and filmmaker Jonathan Ball offers the first book-length study of this legendary Canadian film and Paizs’s other important films from the 1980s. Exploring Paizs’s postmodern aesthetic and his use of pastiche as a cinematic technique, Ball establishes Crime Wave as an overlooked but important cult classic. In this book launch and screening, Jonathan Ball will present three of Paizs’s best films with a reception to honor this new book.
The Crime Wave book launch is generously sponsored by the University of Toronto Press
The Obsession of Billy Botski / Directed by John Paizs, 1980,
Canada, 25 min / Billy Botski’s fantasy of possessing Connie, an imaginary,
elusive, feminine ideal assembled from gender stereotypes, comes to life and
dies in the same fateful night.
Springtime in Greenland / Directed by John Paizs, 1981, Canada,
24 min / A backyard barbecue provides the setting for a diving competition between Nick and Corny Blower: a comedy of male rivalry, intertwined with a documentary about the suburban paradise of Greenland and a commercial about the House of Tomorrow.
Crime Wave
Directed by John Paizs
1985, Canada, 80 min
John Paizs’s Crime Wave is a seminal film in Winnipeg independent filmmaking in the 1980’s – a work of incredible imagination and inventive ideas. Upon its release in the mid 1980’s the film played to terrific acclaim at film festivals across North America. Crammed with B movie gags and pop cultural references the movie follows the story of Steven Penny, a crime writer who wants to create the perfect color crime movie but can’t because he is only good at writing beginnings and endings, not the stuff in the middle.
