There are cultural jokes that seem to have always been there, with no discernable point at which they became idiomatic or funny in that not-really-funny, quasi-ironic way. These expressions tend to be trite but unavoidably useful. The one I'm thinking of in particular, and the one that pretty much nails it how I feel about Michael Mabbott's Citizen Duane , is this: I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed.
That's because Mabbott's first film, The Life and Hard Times of Guy Terrifico , is pretty damn terrific. It has an unusual and distinctive storytelling style, memorable music, solid performances, some of the sweeter stunt cameos in recent memory, and it gave a sense that Mabbott was an artist to watch, someone with a keen ability to mix creativity and a contemporary mindset with genuine appeal for big audiences - the kind of audiences who like country music and This Is Spinal Tap and Entourage (all of which Guy Terrifico shares qualities with). It heralded the director as maybe, possibly someone who was on his way to finding the secret to making accessible and adventuresome Canadian films.
Citizen Duane is certainly accessible. It tells the story of Duane Balfour, a teenager in the small town of Ridgeburg, who decides to try and quash years of harassment at the hands of local autocrats, the Miltons, by running for municipal office against matriarch, Mayor Kelly Milton. Duane is haunted by the shame left by his late father, who was gunned down by the Ridgeburg police while delivering a heated Apocalyptic sermon from his rooftop; seems dad lost his marbles when the town shrugged off his predictions that the town ridge, site of a new housing development, was on the verge of collapse.
But Duane is plucky and resourceful, and he wages a spirited campaign, calling on the help of his wet sock brother Maurie (Devon Botick) and drunk Uncle Bingo ( The Tao of Steve 's Donal Logue) to get his democratic message across.
The story is competently told, and there are some fine performances, notably from Alberta Watson, who plays Duane's exasperated mother. But there is nothing here you couldn't find in a comparable teen television comedy - Saved By The Bell or Parker Lewis Can't Lose . The lynchpin should be Duane. But while 21-year-old Douglas Smith is likable in the role, the script makes the fatal mistake of trying to render a whip-smart teenager without actually being as smart as real teenagers are. Teens are savvy creatures; they like dark things, sex, sarcasm, Dave Chappelle, and Quentin Tarantino. I suspect they will find jokes about simian jockeys and "Locktoberfest" quaint, patronizing and not at all funny, and lines like "That was artless" - uttered by Duane after he tries to ruin his rival's car with an armoured bicycle - painfully artificial.
Which begs the question: who is the film for? The answer is elusive. A film like Rushmore appealed to both adults and teens by blurring the line between adulthood and teenhood; ditto for Napoleon Dynamite , Ghost World and the recent Brick . Though Duane is gunning for a decidedly adult job, he is always hobbled by a stereotypical precociousness, and the film is stuck in an awkward quasi-adolescence. It is the adult version of a teenage world.
Worse, it also feels totally impersonal, which is where the disappointment comes in. Mabbott does include some of his stylistic signatures, using grainy, home-video style footage to nice effect. But the story has none of Terrifico 's latent pathos, none of its grit, and none of its playfulness. It feels like a filmmaker settling into an industry, rather than a creative career. And if that's no reason to get mad, it's surely one to be disappointed.
"Ich Bin Ein Quebecer!" So slurs Congorama 's Belgian protagonist, Michel, while celebrating the discovery of his suppressed French-Canadian heritage; it is a cry you may want to make, too, after seeing this shining example of how Quebecois cinema - in this case, co-produced with Belgium - continues to run laps around its English counterpart.
Borrowing both a style (tense social realism) and a star (Olivier Gourmet) from the Dardenne brothers, director Philippe Falardeau tells the story of Michel, an inventor whose life is thrown into discord when he finds out he is adopted. In Quebec to find his birth parents, Michel meets Louis (Paul Ahmarani), a man trying to salvage his AWOL father's smeared reputation, and to find the key to dad's greatest unfinished creation: an electric car. When an accident separates the two men, Michel returns to Belgium, but remnants of his overseas encounter soon begin to complicate his relationship with his Congolese wife, Alice (Claudia Tagbo).
Falardeau uses a deft overlapping structure to tell the tale, looping backward halfway through the film to revisit events from a different perspective. After leading up to the central event twice, he moves back to Belgium for the third act, which contains some superb acting from the two male leads and a couple of curious twists near the end.
There's a lot to recommend in Congorama : a delicate balance between subtle quirk and stark drama, layered themes dealing with identity, ancestry and racism, assured camerawork from André Turpin. But it's the characters that really make it stick. Both Michel and Louis are flawed, initially not very likable, and totally, recognizably human despite - or because of - some weird little traits. Gourmet and Ahmarani run with these, and in the process turn a somewhat cluttered and more-than-somewhat improbable script into a funny and moving story, and a strange little gem of a film.
Of the 20-plus films I saw at Cannes back in May, mostly within the Quinzaine des Realisateurs [Director's Fortnight] competition, many left a sour faux-art fog in my mind, but none more than Julia Loktev's one-trick, process-based Day Night Day Night . Following an ambiguously ethnic teenager as she prepares to blow herself up in Times Square in the name of ideology, Loktev's film offers a portrait of youth desperately seeking meaning in life. The first half has the ever-apologetic and demure "She" (Luisa Williams) taking directions first via cell phone and then in person at a hotel, where her oddball employers ask her to try different clothes and rehearse her new fake name. The second half places "She" in Times Square, where a variety of fast food detours and mechanical malfunctions derail her mission.
Admittedly, Loktev, a former DJ and experimental sound student in Montreal, couldn't have chosen a better person than Leslie Schatz (Van Sant' Last Days and Elephant ) to flesh out the film's intense interior audio treatment, which is nothing short of genius. But Loktev's premise that "the film is evidence and the audience the jury" ultimately falls flat because the film simply uses the loaded - yet popularly provocative - suicide bomber topic as a giant plot point. Though I have no doubt countless American writers will be lining up to praise Loktev for a brave and harrowing tale of their biggest fear, what kind of valuable discussion can result from a film in which no opinion is related, and the narrative refuses to reveal the slightest semblance of motivation? Setting aside the too-obvious explanation of dedication to a higher being, if Loktev is suggesting that the decisions - rational or otherwise - such humans make are simply hopelessly incomprehensible, then why bother seeing the film in the first place?
Released in the Winter of 2006, Paul Fox's debut feature The Darkest Hours was your typical Canadian Film Centre production: a meandering genre piece lacking identifiable characters (save a solid performance by Aidan Devine as an escaped serial killer) that apparently seemed like a good idea for a 'low-budget' effort. Everything's Gone Green , his sophomore effort, continues this tradition from a script standpoint, bringing to life the first screenplay penned by Douglas Coupland, Canada's most celebrated (and inoffensive) pop culture observer.
Following the slacker lifestyle of Ryan (Paulo Constanzo) as he ventures forth from a broken relationship into a new condo and new job, EGG slowly moves from average premise to stereotypical disgruntled office worker send-up to an awkward morality tale about not taking nature - and life, for gawsh sakes - for granted. And then there's the myriad lame supporting characters: a friend who uses a chocolate milk business as a front for growing weed; a woman Ryan bangs who just happens to have her own webcam channel (that his fellow employee just happens to be obsessed with); Ryan's parents, who grow pot in their basement; the young capitalist brother with nothing but money on his mind; and the hot Asian female who will become our hero's salvation. On top of this, Ryan is apparently a photographer - as a hobby, natch - and also likes to hang large-scale versions of his photos in his condo (you guessed it: another convenient plot point).
As it was likely Coupland's name that got this project the green light, it's easy to lay blame for the story's ineptitude solely with him. But while it's hard to imagine any director breathing life into this project, Fox needs to take blame for the details: an editing style that relies too heavily on gimmicky montages; flat dialogue scenes; giving Ryan a simple digital point-and-shoot to denote his status as a quasi-professional photographer; and overindulgent slow-motion film set jokes. Worst of all? For a movie with two major B-plots involving weed cultivation, a slacker lead, and a Vancouver setting, not a single soul actually smokes bud. A thorough waste of anyone's time, other than the people who made good green off of it.
Fido , this year's Canada First! opener, answers the question posed by every zombie film since Night of the Living Dead : instead of mowing the ghoulies down with shotguns, can't we find them something useful to do?
Writer/director Andrew Currie says yes. His colourful genre salad is set in a world where zombies have been tamed with electronic collars and put to work doing everyday drudge work. This thanks to an omnipotent company-cum-regulatory body called ZomCon, whose head of security begins the film by moving into a new home in a Rockwell-esque neighbourhood, across the street from our heroes, the Robinson family.
Trouble starts when Helen Robinson (Carrie-Anne Moss) decides she's had it with being the only homemaker on the block with no zombie, regardless of her husband Bill's (Dylan Baker) petrifying fear of the creatures. Enter Fido (an unrecognizable Billy Connolly), a domesticated flesh-eater who quickly wins the hearts of Helen and her inquisitive but wimpy son Timmy (K'Sun Ray). When Fido gets off his leash and eats a local crone, Timmy covers it up, but ZomCon bigwig Jonathan Bottoms (Henry Czerny) gets suspicious, especially when hordes of fresh zombies start attacking the citizens.
Currie is painting with broad strokes here: the 1950s-style world is a gaudy, self-conscious artifice, combining Tim Burtonian fantasia with the dark, zany humour of Joe Dante's The 'Burbs and a dash of David Lynch's dementia. It's either note-perfect or overdone, depending on how fond you are of really, really heavy art direction. Meanwhile, the popcult references fly fast and furious - Lassie , Romero, "you crazy, beautiful zombie!," etc. - and the dialogue underlines itself emphatically, with lines like "Thanks to ZomCon, we can all be better citizens, even after we die!" and "Please don't play baseball by yourself - it makes you look lonely."
Underneath the brashness, there are some serious thoughts going on, and when they bubble up to the surface - as in the burgeoning romance between Helen and Fido, which turns the Far From Heaven scenario on its ear - the film is robust, funny and smart. But for too much of its running time, it feels somehow hollow; it passes quickly, but not for satisfaction so much as a strange sense of insubstantiality. Furthermore, it's painful to watch the kinetic Billy Connolly go to waste, his explosive humour choked by dirt-grey makeup and a series of grunts.
Currie has visual flare to spare, and a great sense of how genre can be used to confound expectations and bring up sensitive topics. But he needs to figure out how to use it for emotional and visceral effect. At one point in the film, Bill Robinson tells his son, "Feeling's not important." The film's thematic content suggests that it is, indeed, very important - so it'd be nicer if the actual story had some.
Expanded from the short film Gowanus, Brooklyn at the Sundance Institute, Half-Nelson is the debut feature for New York director Ryan Fleck and his creative partner Anna Boden. HN stars an eminently believable Ryan Gosling as Dan, an off-kilter public school teacher who actually seems to be able to connect with his students, if no one else in his world. Following Dan through the daily (and nightly) repercussions of his special after-school drug addiction, Fleck and Boden simultaneously reveal the family life of student Drey (Shareeka Epps), the daughter of a working mother cop, and her relationship with Frank (Anthony Mackie), her jailed brother's friend. As Dan's private world grows increasingly empty, Drey finds her hero disconsolate in a locker room bathroom stall, crack pipe in plain view.
The delicacy with which Fleck handles the revelations of Frank's intentions for Drey, not to mention the developing tension between Dan and Frank over his precious hook-up, shows real narrative skill. A wall to wall score featuring music ripped from Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It In People often feels a bit overdone, though, as does the unnecessarily jerky hand-held camera work - both intended to ramp up the believability and drama of key moments. While the narrative as a whole turns many clichés on its head, there are moments that offer awkward stereotypes that don't seem to be needed in the film: Dan's racist, drunken parents, his bitch of an ex and a barely dealt with rape/assault. In the end, as is to be expected from an adaptation of a short, the film runs long and sometimes feels unnecessarily heavy (ie, the doc-style civil rights discussions in class) and the ending is too tidy to reconcile with Dan's self-indulgent, spiraling lifestyle. While it's plausible that the character could turn things around, Fleck and Boden's suggestion with the final shot that all is well is a less brave and assured filmmaking choice than opting out of a happy ending, and one that the duo will hopefully move past with their next project.
Following up Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) , a movie that won the Palme D'or at Cannes and pleased critics with its focused, relentless pacing and narrative, is surely no easy task. That film combined stunning videography of contemporary natural landscapes and their inherent isolation with a unique tale of persistence, and the result was a highly involving cinematic tour de force .
This time, director/producer Kunuk and DOP/producer/editor Cohen adapt the non-fiction journals of Danish explorer/scientist Knud Rasmussen ( Jens Jørn Spottag), which record his 1922 visit to Iglooik, where he encountered Aua ( Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq) , the last of the great Inuit shaman. Kunuk and Cohn focus on Rasmussen and his 'white man' party as they conduct ethnological research in the region. After witnessing the spiritual dedication and affirmation of the Inuit, and seeing how the 20th century is encroaching on their way of life, Rasmussen broaches the idea of visiting relatives with the help of members of the clan, but along the way they soon encounter rough terrain and blistering storms, moving little each day. By the time they reach the camp, they have no food and are at the mercy of their recently reformed, distant Christian relatives. However, this is also the story of Apak ( Leah Angutimarik) , a daughter of Aua, and her relationship to both her dead husband and the clan's survival in the new world; unfortunately, her story remains only partially explored.
Overall, long takes - mostly in close-up - and tales don't hold as much power as they could, because they so often come back to back. The overall editing often lacks both narrative motivation and a cohesive sense of pacing. Running at just about 2 hours, JKR would have done well to employ some of the extra time Atanarjuat spent on establishing atmosphere and visual context. Stick around for the credits, featuring Rasmussen's original photographs, and the best shot of the entire film - an isolating zoom of a dogsled pulled across the vast tundra.
Mads Mikkelsen is the closest thing to a walking skeleton you're likely to find, a man whose thin face and sunken cheeks make him look perpetually perturbed, and not a little bummed. For this reason alone, he's perfect for the role of the downcast husband in Ole Christian Madsen's Prague . (It's also why he'll make such a damn fine Bond villain in the upcoming Casino Royale .) Of course, there are also his acting chops, which are substantial. Mikkelsen carried the second chapter of William Winding Refn's Pusher trilogy (screened last year at TIFF; see review here ), and he's given memorable performances in Suzanne Bier and Anders Thomas Jensen's Open Hearts and Lone Scherfig's Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself .
Prague puts the Danish thesp front and center as Christoffer, a man who must go to Prague to bury his long-estranged, recently-deceased father. Accompanying him is his wife of 14 years, Maja (Stine Stengade). The trip starts miserably enough, as Christoffer identifies his father's body and wrestles with the cultural challenges of a new country. But things really turn to shit when he calls Maja on having an affair, which she has continued to conduct on the trip, over her cell phone.
Madsen is a master of controlled, alienating compositions, highlighted with merciless lines and swaths of frigid teal. Really, the film should come with a warning: those whose relationships are on the rocks, please avoid. Love, loyalty and passion are damaged things in Madsen's Prague, and the key piece of dialogue, repeated several times by various characters, is "life is hard." (See also "Sometimes when you're not around, I don't even remember what you look like.")
But the grim mood is worth weathering to get the insights about how foreign surroundings and circumstances bring forth truths in ourselves, why something as superficially simple as an affair can cause the most complex emotional reverberations, and why people run away. And, of course, for Mikkelsen, whose performance here confirms he's one of the finest actors at work today.
The U.S. vs. John Lennon is a dense, tightly edited powerhouse of a documentary that uses an amazing array of archival footage, contemporary interviews and a nearly constant musical score to create a whole that begs repeat watching by history students and Lennon fans alike. The film focuses on the period in John Lennon's life when he evolved from mop-topped Beatle to political activist, peacenik, and general pain-in-the-ass for the Nixon administration. With Yoko Ono as co-conspirator and inspiration, Lennon refused to back down from his arguments and took to the streets (and bed) to fuel the youth-led backlash against the Vietnam war. The late sixties/early seventies was such a historically dramatic time that the film sometimes suffers from trying to cram too much in before the end credits. Nixon officials, Ono, Lennon's friends and reporters all vie for your attention, and their insights are often astute.
Ultimately the heart of the film is the footage of John Lennon navigating a turbulent America and offering his insights on war and peace, and everything that comes between the two. Lennon's confidence was formidable but never forced, and his rebellion was authentic. The film suffers, however, when it abruptly switches gears to bring Lennon into the war of words against modern U.S. policy. It's important to remember he was a man fighting his own battles in his own time; using him to overtly condemn the current American administration feels like forcing an argument into the mouth of a man never short for words.