Q&A: Matt Silver & Pat Kiely (Kidnapper Films, Who Is K.K. Downey?)

Screenwriters, comedians, and mensches Matt Silver and Pat Kiely took some time to answer my questions about their work on the Showcase Series' The Foundation. 2 episodes of the upcoming series will be screened as part of the Just For Laughs Festival, which opens on Thursday, July 16th and occasionally subjects Montrealers to more street theatre than even they can handle.

How did Mike Dowse approach you to work on this project?

We had known Mike for a little while through our mutual friend Paul Spence. He had seen a few of our sketch shows back in the day and so when it came time to put together a writer's room, he gave us a shout. The room included myself, Pat Kiely, Paul Spence, a hilarious dude named Gord Skillet, Mike Dowse, his producer Jennifer Wilson, and a seasoned T.O. writer named Jackie May. It's really the best way to write comedy in my opinion, because you just sit around all day trying to be the funniest guy or girl in the room. (full disclosure: I was never the funniest guy or girl in the room).

You and Pat play the Tak Brothers in The Foundation: can you describe a bit about your characters and their relation to the series?

Pat plays an ex-Olympian who loses his legs to a drunk driver, and I play his skeevy drug-addict brother. In it's simplest terms, Pat is recruited to wheelchair his way across Canada by the head of a charitable organization and I tag along as his manager and drug dealer. Neither of these brothers are the nicest or healthiest dudes, and essentially they figure out pretty quickly a way to cheat the system by attaching the wheelchair to the back of a tour bus.

Both of you, if IMDB is any indication, appear to have had a rather busy couple of years, even besides working on K.K. Downey. Besides your God-given talent, Protestant work ethic and mounds of charm (etc., etc.), do you find that there's anything community-wise that Montreal has, that has kept you steadily working?

We've been lucky enough to have a bunch of friends who, over the last few years, have gone into production with a bunch of stuff. The anglo production community is pretty tight in Montreal, so if someone decides to shoot something (usually on a limited budget) they know that there's a pool of cheap talent out there. We just happen to be the cheapest of the cheap talent.

When will the series debut on Showcase?

I'm not 100% sure when The Foundation will be on Showcase. I'm thinking sometime in Autumn but again I'm not totally sure about that.

Pat Kiely: The only thing I can add is that "The Foundation" premieres on Sunday nights, starting September 20th at 10pm (after Weeds and before Kenny vs. Spenny).

Are there any plans for anything from Kidnapper Films in the works?

Kidnapper is cooking a few things up. We're hard at work on the script for our next feature, ostensibly a Montreal period piece where three idiots fix a horse race. We're also putting the finishing touches on another script which is being produced by Mike Dowse (FUBAR, Pete Tong) and John Hazlett (Suburbanators, These Girls). Besides that...shit I think that's it.

And... WHERE IS YOUR SERIES?

Where indeed, my friend. Where indeed. I'll keep you posted on that one.

Matt Silver as Mark in the film One-Man Party. Directed and shot by Mark Slutsky for the 2008 Montreal 60 Second Film Festival. This year's edition will be taking place on September 9th through 11th at Sala Rossa.

Thanks for the shout-out, Pardon My Hindi!

High School Lesbian Poetry Teacher

The shirt of a high school lesbian poetry teacher. Pedagogical Lesbianism. Sapphic poetry, odes of love from Sappho's Island of Lesbos ("What an island." - Burt Lancaster, in The Midnight Man). Is it simply the purview of academia, or does it have deeper resonance, in the creative writing workshops and homoerotic homework sessions of middle America? Across the pond, does the oeuvre of Jeanette Winterson inspire desire? Do daughters

Do nymphet nubilians squat and strong alike gather round to discuss Nubians, Sophie Scholl, Buckingham Nicks, and the near Talmudic levels of meaning in the 2 Live Crew chant of "hood-rat, hoodrat, hoochie Mama!" Poutina or poutine? Is it only adult fun, or young work? Lyrical lines on the elegance of the yellow heron or Yeats' mischievous soul?

Polanski's late-night dalliances with Sharon Tate, squatting in shadows, alone in the apartment, the thick, strange, brooding mood and anchorless violence of "Knife in the Water." How did Dean Martin & Mia Farrow play into this? Did Frank Sinatra (Senior, not Frank Sinatra, Jr., that faked Lindbergh baby) have dark connections to a couple of world famous riflemen, one of which ? Incestuous strands tied together here and there. What's the meaning of the Chinese Walk Into Ocean meme? Racist claptrap not on the level of Konrad's Captain Kurtz? Apocalyptic Christian hysterics from born-again grandmothers? Post-modern paranoia with anti-mercantilist roots, as old as the times of Tutankhamun and his Egyptian tomb? Lupid rhymes with stupid, but lupus rhymes with a couple Latin words, maybe. Shameless video clips. Shamelessly wondering if you can ride a dog. Can you ride a dog? Can I ride a dog? Dogs can be flea-bitten, but can they be ridden? Saddle up to ride, astride, a Labrador or a Pekingese? Who is the most disturbing, kitschy, and perverse? The director of KPax, the director of the film Powder (albindo deer-healing prowess), or outsider artist par excellence Henry Darger, janitor by day who favoured inaccurate depictions of flat-fronted genitalia, like Depression-era dolls done art brut?

Symphony no 6, op 74. Or Symphony Number 6, Opus Number 74. Tchaikovsky, by the Leningrad Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. Here we find the light touch and seemingly effortless of a genius. The mood sours, the pace quickens, the strings swell! Proto-Gershwin for Fellow Travelers! A Rhapsody in Red! That's familiar!

I went to a Japandroids show, last night, in Montreal. Never heard the band, but they both went to UVic, guess they shopped at Ditch. Some guy was opening up named Slim Twig, played amped-up looped and sampled post-punk-noise-funk, as if Sunny Kay from the VSS was now fronting Suicide for a reunion tour, instead of Alan Vega, and he wasn't afraid to trade in rockabilly licks for Sly & The Family Stone loops. Never saw Japandroids, but they like Atlas Strategic. Fine. Evan Dubinsky was there, from the pride of NDG, Bad Flirt. Evan, if you're nationalistically Googling yourself right now, Hi. Evan Dubinsky, who will soon move to Los Angeles to seek fame, fortune, and a better quality of t-shirt, made with pride by migrant workers paid a living wage under the watchful eye of Dov. Noah Bick, too. Hi, Noah! (Well, he was there. Noah isn't re-locating to the USA. Not yet...) Really, though, I bet Evan's moving to California to escape the creased-corduroy socialism of his brother, who has ties, deep and pink, to Canada's NDP (New Democratic Party). Evan wants to be more Donald & Keifer Sutherland than Shirley Douglas, daughter of Tommy Douglas.

Chinese Marching Into The Ocean.

Of interest to at least two or three of the five people who read this thing, here's an mp3 from Dan Beckner of Wolf Parade's old band, Atlas Strategic. (Daddy's Hands comparisons are not appreciated, thank you.) It's from their Global Symphonic debut, "Rapture Ye Minions" and isn't found on the "That's Familiar" EP.

Atlas Strategic - Jeered By Minor Demons

Last night Michelle and I took some time out of our busy schedule of guzzling booze and shoving American teenagers around on Ste-Catherine to catch "I Heart Huckabees". Keenly aware of just how awful this film was going to be, I (for one) left the film at least mildly amused. The film was terrible, parts of it even worse than I could have expected (peppered, context-less references to Kafka and Magritte, a loopy-doopy animistic philosophy erroneously defined as "existentialist"?), but there were a couple of things to be said in its favour - firstly, Jude Law and Naomi Watts' (no relation, thank you) performances were equally astonishing and amusing, much more so than Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin, who, though seeming to be having fun with the, err, material, didn't interest me. Naomi Watts' character, a spokeswoman for the Huckabees line of big-box department stores, is especially great in one scene where, after a life-changing epiphany, she dons a bonnet and some baggy overalls and films an ennui-filled commercial for the corporation. And outside of that? Some brief moments of physical comedy, and thank fucking God that this was not another "soundtrack film", in the vein of Rushmore, Lost In Translation, and The Royal Tennanbaums. (I'm sure Napoleon Dynamite is similarly afflicted, but I'm not planning on seeing that anytime soon - probably just a remake of The Adventures of Sebastian Cole?). The Shania Twain cameo was putrid, on her part, though there seemed to be a slight skewering of her throughout the film, identifying her with a fanbase comprised of clueless parents and dimwitted office yokels.

Essentially, the film would have been better served by a once-over by the two people the director was trying to ape - Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufmann... The skewering of the suburban minister's family, while a wee bit obvious of a target (cmon, SUVs?), was dead-on.

On our way back from the theatre (incidentally, the AMC Forum - my first time inside that building - what kind of monstrosity is that? The carpet? The grotesque hockey fan in the old forum seats? The crowd of people dancing to Lou Bega's "Mambo Number 5"?) I spotted my first piece of evidence that there actually exist real people who will be voting for George W. Bush. Sure, we're told the race is close and what not, but I think it's simply that the media wants to be perceived as journalistically objective that we're told this incumbent is doing so well, I mean, there couldn't be that many people on this planet that admire this man, right? Right? Err. Anyway, a late model luxury automobile with New Hampshire plates and a black and white Bush-Cheney 04 bumper sticker and a shrinkwrapped book on Christian living under the back window (shrinkwrapped book?!?!?!)... Michelle hypothesized that they were up here getting their flu shots, but I'm thinking that this was something a little more domestic - like a police plant to catch vandals - I mean, something that absurdly offensive on Ave. du Parc? And a shrinkwrapped book?

This weekend's Globe and Mail China special is astonishing - great articles by Jann Wong, Ian Brown and the rest of the staff. I even read the business section. I can recall in my childhood some friend of the family and member of the fundamentalist church I attended telling me that China was a force soon to be aligned with the AntiChrist, and that the Chinese would soon walk into the ocean, one after another, to cross it and invade North America. There seem to be some logistical problems with that, of course, but hey, when you're a member of a church that denies a metaphorical reading of the Bible in favour of a literal, well, all is possible! The Chinese walk into ocean is the beginning of a great joke that's yet to be written.

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And finally, the only decent thing to come out of Calgary in, uhh, forever... Equal parts of the Rye Coalition and Six Finger Satellite, it's Fake Cops!

Fake Cops - Sir, You're Not Blowing