by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

A decade ago an NDGer named Tom Berry pumped out about a dozen C-list, low-budget money-making schlocky flicks starring James Brolin or Justine Bateman, like Deadbolt. "They're big in places like Tanzania," he explained to me.

That was the way we made movies back then - commercial, unpretentious and cheesier than a double poutine.

Then suddenly, Hollywood started shooting big-name films here and popping a billion dollars a year into our local economy, and fuzz and buzz began as stars were hanging out at your local pool hall. Film studios opened, a commission was wooing the big flicks up north and the good days of being validated by celeb culture were back, as if John and Yoko were back in bed and Burton and Taylor were snuggling at the Ritz.

And now, just as suddenly, in this glorious summer of blue skies and stout trees looking leafy from a wet spring, we can't even get James Brolin up here.

Our collective brush with fame is now a distant dream. No more Ethan Hawke tossing Frisbees with frizzy-haired Concordia chicks, no more George Clooney or Julia Roberts in line for coffee. The Scottish guy I met who moved here to be a paparazzi has moved elsewhere.

We undercut others and now we've been undercut. But there are two other reasons for this: the movies we make consistently suck and the locals asked for too much.

The latest fiasco happened last winter, when one of them bureaucratic organizations with a famously long Quebec acronym - the APFTQ - declared itself the buffer between the filmmakers and the Quebec film workers. This was designed to make it easier for Quebec filmmakers to hire local film workers, who were being constantly snapped up and hired by the richer Americans.

The Yanks objected and stopped making movies here. It wasn't the first bureaucratic bump they'd faced. There was the 2001 actors' strike that had them pulling out. Also, ACTRA forces American productions to use entirely Canadian actors except for a handful of lead actors. There are a thousand other procedural union hassles - on some films, for example, the director is shadowed by a translator who repeats orders to the staff in French.

Some combination of these factors produce the "Montreal Effect," a term I recently saw in a review panning The Day After Tomorrow, which apparently joins the long list of Montreal-shot clunkers which include the all-time-bad-list-candidates Pluto Nash and Battlefield Earth.

The new Dennis Quaid movie about a devastating killer coldness (something commonly known in these parts as "winter") has met much disfavour along with the many that went before it. I want to like these movies, and came close to enjoying a Hollywood-Montreal one until I saw Charles Dutton playing Halle Berry's husband in Gothika. No amount of a semi-clad Halle running through Hotel Dieu hospital could make up for the unlikelihood of her being married to this chunky old bald guy.

It can also be disconcerting to watch a movie and see your neighbours in it, like Denzel Washington's The Bone Collector, where acquaintances kept popping up, including my old squash foe Arthur Holden and my then-city councillor Sonia Biddle, playing Denzel's nurse.

Montreal-shot movies often come close but never get over the hump - Confessions of a Dangerous Mind rolls okay until the who-gives-a-shit factor hits you like a catapulted cantaloupe. Taking Lives has the bad French-from-France cops. Shattered Glass has too little story to tell. Snake Eyes had too much Gary Sinise in navy uniform for me.

There's something underwhelming about anything that gets shot here and maybe one day I'll put my finger on the problem. But until then, somebody at least get Brolin up here.

• • •

Let's stay together: I've been asked about the imponderously dull demerger question, which finally goes to vote très soon. My advice is to think it over long before voting to get out of Montreal. Not only will the demerged towns be emasculated, but those who bail on Montreal sacrifice the chance of a lifetime to gain some status, influence and control in one of the world's great cities.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca