In the lead up to the 7th Canadian Film Festival in Australia (August 2012), join us as we countdown the Top 100 Canadian Films of the past 30 years. We'll be posting one film a day leading up to Canada Day on July 1st 2012. Do you agree with our staff favourites? Let us know your thoughts!
“Noam Gonick's Hey, Happy!, a camp comedy featuring much strong language, drug use, gay sex, full frontal nudity, and generalized ridicule of religious beliefs, received support from no fewer than seven government agencies, ranging from the Canada Council for the Arts to Manitoba's Film and Video Production Tax Credit program. In the United States, Hey, Happy! would be lucky to receive the publicity benefits of a ringing denunciation on the floor of the Senate.”
Thus began the New York Times review of Gonick’s debut feature following its world premiere at Sundance in 2001. The controversial director’s work explores a variety of iconoclastic issues and positions surrounding radical politics and queer sexuality, in a tradition which stretches from New York underground filmmaker Jack Smith to fellow American greats in transgressive films such as John Waters and Gregg Araki, to Canadian masters of perverse cinema, Bruce LaBruce and Guy Maddin. The latter two have been the subject of a documentary and a book, respectively, by Gonick.
Set in a retro-futuristic Winnipeg made to look like an industrial wasteland halfway between Antonioni and Tarkovsky, the film takes place in the last days before an apocalyptic flood. DJ Sabu decides to stage a rave on top of a giant landfill to usher in the end of times. Part of this plan is a somewhat mythical quest to secure geeky UFO-ologist, Happy, as his 2,000th sexual partner, an outcome threatened by a diabolical hairdresser named Spanky and his gang of indigenous henchwomen.
It would be a few years before gross-out comedy spiked with raunchy sex percolated through the Hollywood mainstream. The trend at the time was for stinky Y2K-inspired tech-laden blockbusters, and the anarchic currents blowing through this riotous debut feature were a breath of fresh air.
“I wanted to provide a well-balanced diet, make the audience laugh, cry, get an erection and then throw up in their laps,” says Gonick. “Isn’t that what entertainment is all about?”
Easily derided as amateurish junk, films such as Hey, Happy! form the fertile cinematic trash heap on which more acceptable and endurable film monuments are later built. Like a missing link between Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell To Earth and Gregg Araki’s Kaboom, Hey, Happy! is an irreverent queer sci-fi stoner epic made on the smell of an amyl-soaked rag, but fuelled by love, lust, and true cinephilia.
-Matt Ravier
“Hey, Happy! is many things—stoner midnight flick, sci-fi deconstruction, gay fantasia—but above all it's a love story as sanguine as its title.” – (the Village Voice)
To see the other films in the countdown so far, click here.
Hey, Happy! from Noam Gonick on Vimeo.