The Cult of Walt

As I was writing the last post, I started watching a doc on Bravo about Walter Ostanek, the St. Catharines-based polka band leader. It's called The Cult of Walt: Canada's Polka King, and apparently it got a Gemini nomination for best bio. Go figure.

Why do people bother to make such things? The film has no structure, no style, and worse, no soul. The narration is full of cliches such as "perfecting music that is truly timeless" (to pick one that I happened to hear as I was writing this). It rides along on Ostanek's personal charm and the obligatory bits of polka perfomance. But all it does is keep repeating how great the guy is. There's no insight, no probing questions, no attempt to universalize the story or get beneath the surface. Yawn....

Ostanek has been on my radar for years. More than ten years ago I was hired to write a proposal for a doc series with the exact same concept as the BBC's (and CBC's) "Who Do You Think You Are?" I put Walter in the proposal... and the series didn't go. (Maybe if I'd put in Don Cherry instead...) Around the same time, I saw a lovely film at an early Hot Docs, when it was still held in conference rooms at the Park Plaza hotel. It followed Ostanek and his mentor Frank Yankovic on a tour of the Canadian prairies, and it captured the soul of polka, its players and its fans -- retired farmers who would polka for five hours straight, as long as Frankie and Walter could keep playing. That film made me want to learn how to polka. Watching this newer one, I didn't even tap my toes.