Cinertia

Shivers

2011-10-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

(David Cronenberg, 1975)
Cannily baiting the audience's erotic neurosis at least as much as he indulges his own, Cronenberg's first 'real' feature was also probably his most reviled pre-Hollywood production. He definitely has a lot of fun imagining the utter disintegration of a sterile, controlled apartment complex at the hands of ravening sex-zombies, begat by some rather dodgy men of science with their own delusions of control. The first half hour recalls the creepy, quiet austerity of his sixties stuff, only penetrable, grounded in some kind of recognizable real life; most scandalous of all, the great bulk of these upstanding citizens are brazenly promiscuous, on the make from frame one. And as the hellraising climax comes on, we are treated to a perfectly calculating and sometimes hilarious roll call of flouted taboos, with old ladies, little girls and nellies all joining the fun. In between, our auteur botches the tension build, distracts himself and us with useless homages to George Romero, and deploys a lead actor who looks badly hung over even when he's not visibly flubbing his lines.

Cold Comfort

2011-05-27T20:41:00.000-07:00

(Vic Sarin, 1989)
Possibly, maybe, somebody could have made something out of this script - could have tweaked its gothic burlesque of rural perversity into something appropriately lively, without all the empty gestures toward beauty and mystery. With a rewrite or two, it might have even conceivably been possible to wring consistent, comprehensible characters out of the thing, instead of the unreadable jumble of tics which survives. I can even imagine that these particular characters could have been brought to life by the rather urbane trio of Maury Chaykin, Margaret Langrick and Paul Gross; all have been winning elsewhere and show glimmers of life here. But Sarin's debut at the helm affords an almost too-perfect illustration of directorial cinematographeritis. Not only are his pretty pictures static and meaningless, but the sound editing is incompetent, the dialogue looping is halting, and the too-atmospheric musical score is mixed ridiculously high, stomping all over the film's many inert tableaux in a desperate attempt to simulate content.

Fatal Attraction

2011-05-27T12:30:00.001-07:00

(Michael Grant, 1980)

No not THAT Fatal Attraction. This mess is at least interesting for its obsessively perverse sexuality – about 15 years ahead of the Canuck cinema curve. After a freak head-on collision, psychology professor Stephen Lack and psychotherapist Sally Kellerman progress from hostile litigiousness to red-hot amour fou, in an extramarital affair whose fanciful play-acting goes dangerously over the top in record time. In fact, it frequently seems like all of the character and plot development are happening off screen; relationships shift and mutate so quickly that the protagonists become completely unknowable and credibility is strained to the breaking point. On what planet does a university professor barge into a loaded restaurant, humiliate random diners, fire a loaded handgun into the glassware, and stage a mock-kidnapping without repercussions? And since when does the non-consenting mock-kidnappee wet her panties at the thrill of this arbitrary behaviour? With the dramatic context providing no substantial challenge to the banal realism of the era, the arbitrary eruptions of kink come off as desperate and disfiguring. Kellerman is all right under the circumstances and John Huston’s cameo is a charming afterthought, but Lack is bedeviled by the kind of atrocious post-dubbing that destroys your faith in a movie, and the entire first half is drenched in incongruous 80s synth-boppery, often with gratuitously literal lyrics that prod at the action like a Greek chorus with nothing to say.

Black Christmas

2011-05-25T07:16:00.001-07:00

(Bob Clark, 1974)
Never immersive or cathartic, this distinctly gamey horror film is pure entertainment, saturated with craft and intelligence. The tension between amusement and anxiety that is Clark's trademark has never been more extreme than it is here, as a sorority house full of humorously incompatible types finds itself menaced by a ranting, slobbering, obscene-phone-calling killer from within. What an awesome cast! From Margot Kidder to Kier Dullea to Andrea Martin to Doug McGrath, everyone is clearly having a ball as they tense against type, and no one dominates - Lynne Griffith is still stealing scenes a full hour after she's been murdered. Yet the star of the show doesn't even appear onscreen - very few of the slasher films that "Black Christmas" prefigured are as adept in honoring the ambiguity of their psycho, and the integrity of the conception pays off in spades at the end, with a set piece even more haunting and controlled than the rest of them.

A Christmas Story

2011-05-25T06:21:00.000-07:00

(Bob Clark, 1983)
Wherein Clark the populist provocateur sets out to create a modern holiday classic. And classic it is - but before it is anything else it is broad. Eyes roll, people run around in fast motion, dad talks in a high voice after he's bagged with a bowling ball, everyone mugs and preens into the camera. And it really, really works. Clark's nasty, cynical yet humane conventional wisdom is absolutely made for Jean Shepherd's folksy takedown of every Xmas cliché in the book. Every scene has a payoff, and with (Daniel Pinkwater's) narration tying up all loose ends it moves like slightly clunky lightning. Above all, this movie really gets the inner life of kids. Peter Billingsley's comic delivery carries the film even more than Darren McGavin's, and this absolutely nails familiar but underused types like Billingsley's utterly unreadable brother and a 'terrifying' bully-wimp named Scott Farkas. A couple self-conscious mitigations fail to redeem the gratuitous R's of the climactic Chinese restaurant thing, but coming after a mall Santa sequence as terrifying as anything in "Black Christmas", it's difficult to care.

Gainsaying myself - the dump

2011-05-20T08:12:00.002-07:00

Anyone out there? As I mentioned earlier, the enormous dump of posts below - listed alphabetically and culled from my secret personal blog, where this project began - are provided as a kind of apology for the lull in my current reviewing activity - a lull which will continue for another couple months. Please read them with patience; if you have arguments with them, don't worry - so do I. Having been written at the very beginning of my rapprochement with Canadian cinema, I find many of these reviews embarrassingly inaccurate, glib, misinformed, and incomplete. And prolonged exposure seems to have moved around my good/bad goalposts as well - I am increasingly sensitive to the 'cultural' cop in my head. As I gradually return to the writing half of this Herculean engagement, I expect many of these to be revised substantially. Anyway, they'll still help you kill some time.

Visiting Hours

2011-05-20T08:12:00.001-07:00

(Jean-Claude Lord, 1982)
Here's another one where you should forget about parsing the text. The gabbing about violence and morality via tormented journalist Lee Grant is no more decisive or interesting than the half-assed attempts to get inside the head of yet another Michael Ironside psycho; not that Ironside could defrost the window to his soul with a blow torch and a sunny day. So he grimaces and hacks, hacks and grimaces, in a manner so singularly ineffectual that he actually manages to upstage the idiot cops who give him every opening they can arrange. You'd think, having had a little practice, the guy would be able to plan and execute a decent murder. Instead, everyone keeps getting carted off to the hospital, so he can try again. I should say that, scene for scene, things can get fairly tense and atmospheric, and the actors largely do their job; but the absence of structural logic ultimately does it in. There's no focal point; Grant, Ironside and Linda Purl take their arbitrary turns at the fulcrum, with no sense of ensemble except for an occasional supporting-role interjection. And in this I am NOT referring to Shatner; they must have written his totally extraneous role on short notice, when they found out he was in town for the week.

Rejeanne Padovani

2011-05-20T08:11:00.008-07:00

(1973, Denys Arcand)
Let's try to forget, for just a moment, that this is a Canadian fiction film that actually has something to say about the real world, that it is actually vents rather than channels collective anger - to the point of casting lookalikes of the then-current Montreal power structure, and portraying them as unutterable monsters to a man. And let's not get into how genuine or enduring or correct Arcand's radicalism might be; let's talk about what a fantastic movie he makes out of it. The camera seems to hide in the corners of this mausoleum-like mansion, lingering over entrances and exits until they become the content: the conduction of power and command. There's no mistaking the class commentary of the parallel parties in the dining room and basement. But the king's messengers - inarticulate, glowering, self-absorbed - are far from helpless victims. Nor does Arcand idealize the women who wander from partner to partner seeking their cut of the good life. This movie absolutely nails the sensual allure of wealth and comfort even as the emptiness is laid bare - a percussive shock cut to a close up of pants being unzipped almost steals the whole movie. Until the denouement, that is, where we learn all too clearly the consequences of underestimating the evil powers at play: appeals to human decency will not cut the mustard. In other words, this tiny, claustrophobic movie is actually an epic of human tragedy - a visionary one, and just about perfect too.

Passiflora

2011-05-20T08:11:00.007-07:00

(Fernand Belanger/Dagmar Teufel, 1986)
Another in the seemingly endless chapters of shame at the National Film Board of Canada, this dazzlingly ambitious, daring, formally unique movie finally emerged from 22 years of stealth suppression, for a SINGLE subtitled screening at Inside Out last night. No wonder the Board cut and ran, though - this movie gives no quarter. It is 'about' the Pope's visit to Montreal, with a sidebar on the concurrent Jacksons Victory Tour, and the key refrain is "On your knees!" - spectacle equals subservience, and the upward gaze encourages us to forget those left behind. Queers, transvestites, abused women, old people on meds, crazy people, alcoholic rednecks - all are represented, but not as objects of pity, but as active agents on their own, connected if disparate journeys; and what vision it took to make those links in 1986! And what cheek to interrupt the documentary footage with these FICTIONAL scenes and characters, to layer real-life action with wacky sound effect commentary and creative dubbing and unmistakably non-'objective' asides, and that too-cute animated anarchy snake that keeps showing up. By rebelling so vividly and vitally against the strait-jacketing conventions of documentary, the filmmakers lay bare the way that these conventions are only conventions because they serve exactly the interests of power and repression that the film portrays. Never mind the anticlericism: it is expressly forbidden for a state-produced film to have this much FUN! Which is no doubt why the visionary creators of this amazing film were never allowed to make another.

My Bloody Valentine

2011-05-20T08:11:00.005-07:00

(George Mihalka, 1981)
In some ways, this is a remarkable movie. It is genuinely impressive to see an utterly generic slasher-movie plot unfold in a basically social-realist milieu - the characters are not teenagers but young and not-young working stiffs, and instead of Everytown, USA, we get an unrepentant (if re-named) Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia. Both the ramshackle town and the mine itself are exploited for texture and detail, and the plot is built on a theatricalized variation on the kind of tragic underground mishap that is all too familiar to this setting. There's some good characterization and staging amid the clunkers, and up to a point you have to give the film the benefit of the doubt: as a flamboyant gore-fest with virtually all the gore shorn by its own backers, it's like a comedy routine with bleeps over every single punchline. Even the "director's cut" DVD version is no such thing, a few salvaged scraps that mostly restore only a taste of what was intended; though the pickaxe-through-the-eye-socket number is pretty wicked. Nonetheless, the filmmakers have to share the failure: the movie is stupid in all the wrong places. The rationale for Don Francks' sheriff to not just tell everyone to stay home and lock the doors because a psychotic is loose is agonizingly weak, an obvious afterthought. The Romero-derived idea of having one victim's boyfriend become catatonic for the rest of the movie is sabotaged by the guy's atrocious performance. The love-triangle plot is so predictable that you are taken by surprise when, in the third act, it seems to take an interesting turn, as the two guys team up to rescue the object of their mutual affections; but when they actually get to her they pull a 'wait here, I'll be right back', and not the first one either. And the climactic struggle alternately demands that the murderer be as sluggish and inaccurate as possible, and that the others stand around for minutes at a time, dumbly sizing up the carnage. That adds up to producers, writers, actors and directors all doing their part to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and while you can see them genuinely trying to make it work, they don't.

Life Classes

2011-05-20T08:11:00.003-07:00

(William D. MacGillivray, 1987)
In reviewing this tale of a Cape Breton woman mingling with the Halifax art crowd, Gerald Pratley describes it as "a biting comment on what passes for art today." Maybe he was in one of his rare sour moods that day: for me, this film is remarkable precisely because it straddles worlds without resorting to such heavy-handed dismissals. From life classes to cable-TV bestiality porn, from color-by-numbers to New York video art to transatlantic object envy, on down to the Gaelic lullabies that protagonist Jacinta Cormier will carry with her to her grave, this is first and foremost a comprehensive and exquisitely balanced examination of how art works in our everyday lives. No - in the everyday lives of these specific people, in this specific place, a Halifax where tradition and modernism meet and clash. All of which is communicated through a remarkably patient character based narrative, not auteurist pyrotechnics - which isn't to say that the auteur's ultra-timely fusion of Don Shebib and Atom Egoyan is anything but brilliant.

Hog Wild

2011-05-20T08:11:00.001-07:00

(Les Rose, 1981)
This movie was made before the teen-smut comedy renaissance of the early eighties, sat on the shelf a couple years, then got released after the genre was proven commercially viable. But this film was not viable in any sense of the word. It's unbelievably clunky. Is it even remotely possible to milk laughter from a car up a flagpole, or a stolen hearse dumping the casket at the funeral, or a fat kid acting wounded because he's instructed to murder his mother, or some guy sneaking up on a skinny-dipping woman and stealing her clothes, or a sexy teacher getting turned on by pretending to ride a motorbike, or two people groping each other lasciviously in a vat of honey? We'll never know. Tony Rosato's inscrutable mumbling biker is occasionally mildly amusing, which makes it a solid cut above the rest and the best thing I've ever seen him do, poor guy. But that's cancelled out by the stupidest putative 'resolution' imaginable.

Highpoint

2011-05-20T08:10:00.005-07:00

(Peter Carter, 1982)
This 'mainstream' tax shelter movie hints at what's wrong with this whole era of Canadian filmmaking. I mean, if you are going to pay somebody a MILLION dollars to do a stunt jump off the CN tower, how about CAPTURING IT ON FILM??? The footage of this alleged climax is so shoddy it looks like Dar Robinson lost his grip before Peter Carter yelled 'action'. This director made "Rowdyman", "Rituals" and, well, "High-Ballin'", so don't blame the hired gun: laborious and pointless, this movie was clearly made by bean-counters who lost their calculator. This is the kind of movie where Richard Harris and Beverly D'Angelo will fall in love the first day they meet for no reason except that the genre demands a romantic subplot; and where Toronto and Quebec City locations seem to have been selected as a sop to Tourism Canada. Slathered in too-loud voiceover, its chase scenes eventually degenerating into stereotyped Quebecois bumpkins running down the street in fast motion with chipmunk sound effects on the soundtrack. Harris is game, and the Maury Chaykin/Saul Rubinek bumbling-hit-men routine might have been priceless, but this movie has gaping black holes where the jokes should be. If you're going to be crassly calculating, you better make it worth my time, and this movie sucks.

Fish Hawk

2011-05-20T08:10:00.003-07:00

(Don Shebib, 1979)

An amiable kid's flick with Will Sampson as an Indian who gets in touch with himself while hunting bear and boar on behalf of his white settler friend; he kicks the bottle after his negligence causes the death of his dog. Sampson projects such strength and purpose that his settler counterparts almost disappear. Dad is sheepish and inactive; mom experiences a conversion from her racist beliefs which is sudden, absolute, and barely motivated. The kid stares a lot, and learns an important lesson about life: don't kill the agitated blind boar that killed your dog and 'slow' friend, because he'll be dead by winter anyway...hmmmm. Shebib gives this familiar and calculated script his best shot in hack mode; the animal footage isn't very well integrated, but you can see them trying. And where it doesn't work logically it kind of works emotionally, which I suppose is how it goes with kids' films.

Firebird 2015 AD

2011-05-20T08:10:00.001-07:00

(David M. Robertson 1981)

The sci-fi angle is extremely thin cover for a movie comprising a handful of cars driving around (and around) an undifferentiated desert landscape. It doesn't even pass muster on the car movie's idiotic terms: they don't roll, they don't crash, they don't blow up - well, one does but it's standing still so it doesn't count. They just...drive. This is emblematic of the confused reverence with which the filmmakers approach a fetish that they really don't seem to share: the auto-shop talk and right-to-drive libertarian outbursts seem to be pleading with an audience that knows more about their subject than they do. That would also explain the Radio Shack freebie LP of a soundtrack, which cancels out the shiny outfits that are the only real 'futuristic' gesture. The rednecks are super-normal and nice, the cops frown passively through a feature-length coffee break, and the dune-buggy love interest just can't shut up with the fey double-entendres, And then there's this Native American psycho guy who rolls with the cops, whose presence seems to be aimed at two main functions. First he's the required Big Bad Guy - a lazy 'symbol' of someone stuck in the past, aligned with authority, for the car-lovin' heroes to oppose. And when he finally DOES something, round about the end of the second act, it enables the filmmakers to remake The Searchers in their back yard, in almost total darkness and to no great purpose of course. Apart from that, you'd think no one on set had ever even seen a real movie. Good old Darren McGavin acts like he's still working the floor at the horror convention.

Fireballs

2011-05-20T08:09:00.006-07:00

(Charlie Wiener, 1987)
I started with the last of the loose and autonomous cycle of tax shelter "Balls" films - Meatballs, Screwballs, Oddballs, Goofballs, etc etc - which actually bear more of an affinity with Porky's than with Ivan Reitman's breakthrough: boys, boobs, beer, and attempted belly laughs. I said attempted. This is probably the cheapest and least competent of the lot - not automatically a bad thing since smut is not improved by slickness. But these people really, really don't know what they are doing. From humorous talking parrot to the worst mullet in all cinema to the zaynee beer-hatted wildman, these guys took a sow's ear of a genre and made it into a bowel movement. The best thing you can say about it is that the relief fire crew from Japan doesn't wear buck teeth and pointy hats - unfortunately they don't do anything else, either. I am petty enough to hope no one on the creative team got laid for their efforts.

Find the Lady

2011-05-20T08:09:00.005-07:00

(John Trent, 1976)

An absurd farce in the great British tradition, only the Canadian apple has fallen very far from the tree and got all wormy. Not only does this feature John Candy’s first marquee role, but they fly in Peter Cook, Dick Emery, even Mickey Rooney, who unlike the others is actually given some ostensibly humorous lines to deliver – well, actually just one line, but he gets to deliver it eight or ten times. In the absence of verbal wit, we are granted the most rehashed, labored slapstick imaginable, with a penchant for smashing automobiles that puts John Landis to shame. We also get an anachronistic armload of objectionable stereotyping – an inscrutable Asian cop who is introduced with a gong, an uppity secretary whose skin color is played as a climactic sight gag, and especially the omnipresent drag queen of nightmares (named Bruce LaRousse, ring any bells!) played with nagging aggression by, believe it or not, a young Richard Monette. The film ends with a chase through an abandoned funhouse whose utter familiarity doesn’t prevent the director from botching every single comic opportunity available. Makes Benny Hill look like Oscar Wilde.

East End Hustle

2011-05-20T08:09:00.001-07:00

(Frank Vitale, 1976)
This movie deserves way better than it has received critically - a fascinating example of indie-film collectivos venturing into the well-funded world of that era's commercial Canadian cinema, and hitting the nail on the head. A grotty tale of sex workers in revolt from their scumbag pimp - played by Pump up the Volume director Allan Moyle, a regular in this Montreal cinematic repertory company - this doesn't just out-sleaze 'American Nightmare'; it also comes very close to out-politicking 'Rejeanne Padovani'. Unlike the former, this one is told entirely from the perspective of the sex workers themselves, and they are a fantastic ensemble, bright and damaged in varying proportions, with unnecessarily rich characterization. The protagonist's loving relationship with her boyfriend is particularly revealing - he offers his support, but the filmmakers go far out of their way to make sure that SHE resolves the conflict, not some hero riding to the rescue. The rape scene is as uncompromising as it is un-pornographic, the single-take sex scene is a startling condensation of the movie's down-to-earth world view, and the film's view of community and friendship as the one real lifeline for these women on the edge is almost unprecedented and very moving. And ideology aside, it works very well as a thriller, with suspense and forward motion throughout. This could be a virtual litmus test for bourgeois film critics - if you can't see the brains beneath the sleaze, you've got blinkers on for sure.

Dirty Tricks

2011-05-20T08:08:00.001-07:00

(Alvin Rakoff, 1981)

Having already given us laughable disaster and hilarious horror, Rakoff actually TRIES to be funny here, with predictable results: horrific, disastrous, etc. The most visible irritant is Elliott Gould’s wacky sidekick Rich Little, who as always could wipe the smile off Bozo’s face, and by all appearances he brought his writers with him: the antics center on a forgery designed to convince the world that George Washington took payola from the British. This occasions several visceral and patriotic demonstrations of why high school history was so unendurably vacuous – only, hmmm, it’s set at Harvard. I’ve always liked Kate Jackson, but that doesn’t mean I want to hear her attempt an Alabama-bred Boston accent. And Gould’s usual freewheeling asides merely expose his richly-earned contempt for this material. Also featuring: two atrociously dubbed muscle men with Village People moustaches, two hit-persons who you can tell are Italian because composer Hagood Hardy lets loose with the gondola-on-Po-River clichés every time they show up, and a rogue surveillance truck that exists solely to facilitate humorous car-crashes. There's even a fucking fruit truck gag,

The Deserters

2011-05-20T08:07:00.008-07:00

(Jack Darcus, 1983)

Here the 'Vancouver New Wave' gets seriously long in the tooth. Even if this draft-dodging allegory script is NOT based on a stage play - a long shot - it is still one of the least cinematic ‘adaptations’ I’ve ever seen. An opening scene on a train, a subsequent scene in an office, and a climactic two minutes of somebody walking down the front steps are the only escape we get from the single, dreary townhouse set, and they are so gratuitous and unintegrated that they’re more of a disfigurement than a relief – especially the first scene, where a bunch of characters we expect to be focal points pop their heads in and then vanish. It’s really saying something to note that Alan Scarfe’s bombastic, tight-ass sergeant gives you something to watch – his character reveal from fierce patriot to delirious casualty of war is definitely the stuff of theatrical cliché, but his rendition is perfectly modulated and more or less spellbinding. Otherwise, we are stuck sharing these cramped quarters with a gratuitously prissy pacifist, a shrill housewife on the make, and a simpering oaf. Darcus tries to use these characters to broaden the antiwar commentary into class and gender analysis, but his erratic grasp of these issues and his stunted staging makes you pine for a car chase.

Deranged

2011-05-20T08:07:00.007-07:00

(Alan Ormsby, 1974)
The dork onscreen narrator is only the tip of the lurid, cartoony iceberg for the trashiest, sickest Ed Gein rip of them all. The visuals cheap and cheesy yet also hauntingly precise, the varied performances anchored in the great redneck burlesque of secret poet Roberts Blossom, this is a real EC comic come to life, with a great moral to boot: fundamentalism begets insanity. On the one hand the utterly over-the-top tastelessness is played for nervous giggles, from the brain-scooping scene to the seance-seduction whose murderous climax is represented in a perfect feathery cutaway. The blood flows thick and constant and redder than lipstick. But there's also a real sense of entrapment and anxiety that can really creep you out. The victims get more and more sympathetic and innocent as the plot progresses, with no increase in luck or mercy to show for it. The opposite, in fact: each murder is more explicitly gruesome than the last, climaxing with the perfectly conceived leg-trap tragedy incident. Which may mean that the absurd humour is a trap too: by the final minutes the balance has shifted to utter consuming dread, the stuff of nightmares. The final shot is perfect in its ambiguity. No masterpiece to say the least, but it's tawdry in the best way.

Def-Con 4

2011-05-20T08:07:00.005-07:00

(Paul Donovan, 1985)

How about that – a smart and funny dystopian sci-fi movie from Nova Scotia. Not TOO smart, mind you – beyond the usual nukes’ll-kill-ya setup, the movie has nothing whatsoever to say about the real world. And there’s some serious attention deficit in the character development – every time a new face shows up, someone we were starting to care about fades into the background like it was a baton relay. But in spite of this, the film maintains interest and momentum through a series of consistently inspired set pieces, from the vaguely Dark Star-ish neurotic claustrophobia of the spaceship incitement, to Maury Chaykin’s wacked out survivalist bunker, to the kangaroo court of the military-fascist adolescent ringleader. The character development is only an issue because the uniformly fine actors are having a lot of fun with them. And the punchline is worth a laugh even if you can see it coming a mile away.

Death Weekend

2011-05-20T08:07:00.003-07:00

(William Fruet, 1976)
Once more for the benighted: Fruet is one of the most fascinating figures of the tax shelter era, having emerged as the writer of Goin' Down the Road, moving on to direct the almost as reputable Wedding In White, only to make a sudden and unchallenged swerve into the cinematic sleaze pit under the sway of an up-and-coming Ivan Reitman. A runty rich guy has a model over to his luxurious mansion in the woods, only to have his rather unrefined advances spurned, causing him to rant at length about the virtues of money and power. Only here come those rednecks from up the street, ready to kick some bourgeois ass. You can tell this was made by people in possession of their brains, most especially Brenda Vaccaro, who is adamant about maintaining her dignity through the lechery; and there's a class-resentment theme sitting right there if you care to look. But it does get rather confused: the same impulse that leads the bumpkins to trash the mansion lead them to rape women, and who knows what the hell that last shot is getting at: did the whole experience leave her more in touch with her primal inner nature or what? At least you're not ever obliged to sympathize with the rich dude, who is almost as hateful as the guy in "Caged Terror". Worth a second look; some cool set pieces.

Death Ship

2011-05-20T08:07:00.001-07:00

(Alvin Rakoff, 1980)
From the people who brought you the absurd "City on Fire" comes this equally absurd yet noticeably improved piece of product about an unmanned Nazi boat that wreaks its wrath on a glamorous boat cruise's bedraggled survivors. The protagonists do almost nothing but run around the hall, the boat exterior and engine-room shots are recycled mercilessly, the 'montage' stuff has Eisenstein pounding on the lid of his coffin, and several groovy set pieces - the waterlogged net o' corpses, the alarmingly full-frontal blood shower - are shamelessly overextended. On the other hand, the film generates a degree of knowing goodwill by having Saul Rubinek's obnoxious comic relief guy drowned at the earliest possible opportunity. And ultimately, the film comes very close to camp classic status on the strength of one brilliant casting stroke: ladies and gentlemen, Mr. George Kennedy! As the asshole ship cap'n turned Nazi possessee, he makes me laugh every time he appears on screen - and when he opens his mouth, take a deep breath. He adds entertainment value to this team's crass silliness, and heroic DOP Rene Verzier - again!! - gives value for money, just enough atmosphere for the goofball content to tense against. Bald idiocy at its most amusing.

Deathdream

2011-05-20T08:06:00.004-07:00

(Bob Clark, 1972)
The first thing you notice is that it looks and sounds great, astonishing enough considering the grainy-grotty Canuck genre films that it prefigures. Even the extremely economical Vietnam opener - achieved with boreal forest, flashpots, and TWO guys in fatigues - is abstract and impressionistic enough to pass. Then it sinks in how smart it is, and how daring, and how concise: the returned Vietnam veteran/zombie spends the whole movie bringing the war back home to his 'idyllic' small town. He is even courteous enough to spell it out: "I died for you, why shouldn't you return the favour?" Remember that this is 1972, fully seven years before Hollywood would permit the gauzy carnival ride of Apocalypse Now, which this movie beats coming and going simply because the spectacle is grounded in a recognizable reality. Pretty grim, but rendered bearable by its out-of-nowhere craftsmanship, and also by Clark's trademark vulgarity: the overdrawn drunk and the snappy double-date dialogue and the guy getting run over at the drive-in don't exactly fit right in, but they reaffirm the film's entertainment value without undermining the scathing nuclear-fam critique. I mean he strangles the dog - how literal can you get? Excitingly good movie.

Dead Wrong

2011-05-20T08:06:00.003-07:00

(Len Kowalewich, 1983)

So Britt Ekland is – get this – a sharpshooting Mountie, whose husband, a hateful moron Mountie, decides it would be a good idea for her to seduce her way on to a narcotic-smuggling sailboat in scenic Colombia. Being one of your less security-minded drug runners in cinema history, and having just sent his mysteriously murderous assistant to a watery grave, the guy – who was hired for the job specifically because he can sail the boat all by himself – shrugs and says come on board, after about fifteen seconds of uninspired banter. On the way down to the shore, there’s this musical interlude thing – one of those numbers where a guy and a girl point at unidentified offscreen objects and laugh joyfully – and may I mention in passing that the music in question is the most hideously, laughably overstated Euromarimba wank that has ever assailed my ears, and that it just won’t go away. Anyway, about an hour later we are forced to conclude that that scene, by itself, was really, truly supposed to signify Ekland falling in love with the hangdog schmuck, to the point where she would forsake mission, career and marriage to be with him. I repeat: there’s NOTHING else; they barely even touch. She fell in love on the way to the boat. That’s how stupid this movie is. I hope everyone involved got sun stroke and/or screw worms.

Deadly Harvest

2011-05-20T08:06:00.001-07:00

(Timothy Bond, 1977)

This bad movie was ahead of its time, positing climate change as a harbinger of the end times, with resultant food shortages rendered catastrophic by the obligatory bunch of corrupt politicians in a transparent stretch-er-out prologue. Hollywood old-timer Clint Walker heads a good farming family caught between marauding urban thieves and a corrupt vigilante farmer mob which tragically seduces his son. Walker’s AM-radio style delivery definitely takes some getting used to, but he sure shows up the rest of the cast: it’s amateur hour all the way, and that condition is viral behind the camera as well, especially in the excruciating master-shot exposition scenes of the first act. If you’re extremely forgiving, it’s possible as the film wears on to appreciate the action scenes and care about some of the characters. When city dad meets country dad and they come to realize the tragedy of their mutual debasement, one assumes that they are about to team up for the common good. Instead they take their debasement and run with it: city dad pulls a Jim Jones on his family, while Walker decides that vigilantism isn’t so bad after all, especially when enacted with a front end loader. Thus the film spares the viewer much agonizing over whether intellectual attainments can redeem utter technical incompetence, by dragging both down to the same rocky bottom. Somehow I am not too thankful for this.

Deadly Companion

2011-05-20T08:05:00.005-07:00

(George Bloomfield, 1980)
SCTV director Bloomfield cashes in his chips by assigning utterly infinitesimal cameos to just about the entire cast of that show, along with Al Waxman, Michael Ironside, Maury Chaykin, you name it. And behind the camera is the ubiquitous Rene Verzier, who at least makes the thing look pretty good. Every once in a while there's a startling jolt of cleverness in the staging or the dialogue, although so much of the latter accrues to cocky bastard Anthony Perkins that one suspects he had a hand in the rewrite. The plot - journalist Michael Sarrazin struggles to regain his lost memory and recall who killed his wife - is inelegant, and the mideast kidnapping subplot is so useless and inexplicable that it just disappears, but there is a certain amount of attention to elementary logic. The real problem - and it's a biggie - is that, in order to (ostensibly) keep the lid on the Big Surprise at the ending, the film almost completely abandons Sarrazin and his investigative mission. Instead the movie turns into the story of his annoying architect girlfriend Susan Clark keeping a series of appointments. Since her character knows quite well what's up, the revelations don't build, the mystery angle hits the dirt and the movie becomes static and pointless. And so it doesn't matter too much whether the ending makes sense: it still pisses you off. Particularly annoying are Perkins' hopelessly perfunctory fate, and the black hole that is Sarrazin's dead wife - who cares about a 'character' that spends the totality of her screen time being strangled?

Deadline

2011-05-20T08:05:00.003-07:00

(Mario Azzopardi, 1981)
Well, Godard said that the proper review of a movie is another movie, and at times this reads like a feature-length adaptation of the Marshall Delaney writeup that got Cronenberg kicked out of his apartment. (It even borrows Cindy Hinds from The Brood.) The setup is transparent: Azzopardi, an acclaimed Maltese theater director, finds himself making films in Canada at the height of the crassness boom. So he makes a movie about a slumming intellectual who writes horror films, ba-dum-bum. It's a bit of a Frederic Wertham job, that's for sure, it unconditionally posits a cause-effect relationship between on-screen violence and the seduction of the innocents. But it works OK if you don't approach it as an absolute moral judgment, but as a fascinating expression of the frustrations felt by artists working in this economic environment: many of them would really rather have been doing something else, and this fact rarely works in a positive way like it does here. And it also partially redeems another Canuck kiss of death, the movie where absolutely every character is a hateful snot. The redemption isn't in the hazy morality, but in the cinematic sense: the insightful but subtle camera placements, the clever use of montage, and the powerful imagery of disintegration at the end. Also, you can't accuse it of being humorless when the first diagetic film clip we see is of a murderous snowblower manipulated by a psychic sheep! If it weren't so flawed, it probably wouldn't be as interesting.

The Darkside

2011-05-20T08:05:00.001-07:00

(Constantino Magnatta, 1987)
This movie is absolutely terrible in a quite remarkable variety of ways. It opens up as a shot-for-shot slaughter of Taxi Driver, and that film's influence keeps popping up in desperate and irrelevant places. (Not to mention the random early-Egoyan homage of the A/V stuff; in fact, Magnatta started his cinematic career playing a tape op in Next of Kin.) The villains are the most hateful caricatures imaginable, and not just because they're played vaguely queer: they actually cackle demonically repeatedly and at length, and in between they smirk a lot. And oh yeah, did anyone even proofread this script?? Why is it so important for the scumbags to retrieve their stupid Betamax roughie? Why are there TWO different explanations for why Cyndy Preston appeared in the video? What could her dangling, utterly out-of-character 'he's just what I need' line mean?? Aaah I could go on. Even the usual name-that-Toronto-location amusements, and a wildly improbable bedroom-farce type hallway chase through the Parkdale Hotel, get swallowed by the dire murk.

Dancing in the Dark

2011-05-20T08:04:00.005-07:00

(Leon Marr, 1986)

The only feature Marr ever made is almost entirely Martha Henry. Glacial, severe, formal, the film adopts a flashback structure to describe an isolated housewife’s sudden and brutal realization that she is living a lie. We shift between Henry in psychiatric prison after murdering her philandering, yet far from monstrous husband, and an earlier Henry in the ‘prison’ of her almost totally solitary domestic routine. Coming from an obviously theatre-reared gang, this movie is impressively cinematic whether it’s playing Citizen Kane games with the dinner table or unspooling an astonishing ten-minute single take husband-and-wife dialogue scene at a 40^th birthday dinner. As the husband insistently questions his wife’s happiness, it becomes increasingly obvious that the happiness in question is his own, and the truth value of the exchange is awesome. After it’s done, though, Henry double-underlines this point in voiceover, and for me that moment was a telling betrayal: for all his attention to communication through everyday detail, Marr can’t resist spelling things out for us. However, while it is too generalized and too articulate, most of the wall-to-wall voiceover does capture the feeling of a damaged woman striving to understand and escape the hole she's stuck in. Her quest to find a voice is ultimately tragic because there's no one to talk to, thus leaving the film open to the usual charges of alienated self-indulgence. But while it doesn't match the rigor of its European role models, I found it thoughtful and moving and successful. Marr's bravura minimalism matches Henry's step for step.

Dan Candy's Law

2011-05-20T08:04:00.003-07:00

(Claude Fournier, 1974)
Not much left of the budget after they hired Donald Sutherland, Kevin McCarthy and Chief Dan George, but in fact this was money well spent, especially in Sutherland's case. As a drunk and loopy mountie attempting to single-handedly put down the uppity Cree of pioneer Saskatchewan, he really gets some space to act, especially in the early scenes. But it's the kind of space afforded by an awestruck director who's out of his depth. Not only can Fournier not maintain any sense of ensemble, but he goes for an 'epic' feel by shooting most of the putative action scenes so ultra-wide that it's virtually impossible to tell who's who, especially once Sutherland dons the rawhide. The film does score points with its quite detailed and apparently realistic portrayal of the Cree resistance, and for a while the balance resembles wisdom; no Hollywood Indians here. But in the final scenes this balance is tragically unmasked as equivocating mush. Not wanting to offend either side in this unfortunate dispute, it degenerates into attempted historical neutrality. The ending is almost too perfect a condemnation of this approach: instead of resolving the through line of Sutherland or any other protagonist, we are treated to a montage of about 30 impassive reaction shots from characters we haven't even met. There's a reason they call them 'dramas' and this ain't it; it's like a noon-hour reenactment at Fort Qu'Appelle. Overall: could be worse, should be better.

Crunch

2011-05-20T08:04:00.001-07:00

(Mark Warren, 1981)
OK, so high school jock comedy isn't my genre. This is, believe it or not, very slightly ahead of the generic curve, thanks to John Vernon and Robert Forster's stoic professionalism in the face of adversity, and also due to a sensibility that is slightly less cruel/hateful than usual. Then again, maybe they just hadn't perfected the formula yet. Not much else in this movie looks like it happened on purpose: there is an incredibly relentless stream of ADR one-liners, as though they shot first and then tried to impose a plot via voiceover. And someone really goofed by structuring the whole film around a climactic half-hour football game, which is shot and framed exactly like...a football game. It almost unfolds in real time. I'd be surprised if even FANS of high school jock comedy gave a damn.

Crossover

2011-05-20T08:03:00.004-07:00

(John Guillermin, 1980)
A troubled production, and it does show: you can see the film doctors trying desperately to straighten out the stylistic curves in this film of a compassionate psychiatric nurse on his own mental slide. I'm not insinuating that the director's cut would have been any sort of masterpiece; he went on to give us "Sheena" and "King Kong Lives". Nonetheless, I found this film's treatment of mental illness to be exceptionally direct and unsentimental, and the critique of psychiatric institutions to be quite substantive, as in the good doctor's distracted and incessant banter about automobiles during a shock treatment session. Kate Nelligan's love interest seems to have lost some substance in the re-edit, but James Coburn is exceptionally likeable as the cat-loving protagonist, applying his usual genial laid back shtick in a revelatory context. My best guess about the disjointed third act is that a lot more hallucinatory POV stuff was jettisoned in favour of an attempted linear narrative that the footage just couldn't support. Or maybe the cutting-room floor holds an even more rigorous institutional critique. Either way, they failed to lobotomize it: this is a smart, humane and touching piece of work.

Cross Country

2011-05-20T08:03:00.003-07:00

(Paul Lynch, 1983)
This is an intelligent, fast-paced, gripping thriller, with able performers taking on an impressive array of quirky-to-shady characters. Lynch does the best work I've seen from him to date here: atmospheric, percussive and sharp as a knife. He even coaxes a halfway-likable performance out of Michael Ironside as the detective with the sick wife. Everyone has a secret in this tale of murder and escape, and the craftsmanship draws you in like quicksand. Unfortunately, it also leaves you to die there. Twist endings are tricky things: if the proper groundwork isn't laid, the audience will feel cheated. Which means that ultimately Lynch lets us down after all: strong scene for scene, he does nothing whatsoever to prepare us for the barrage of 180-degree turns in the closing minutes. And then he admits defeat outright with the desperately cheap wrap-up - you didn't think they were going to travel all the way to the Grand Canyon for nothing, did you? For a while there it looked like this movie was about, you know, human beings. Shakes head sadly.

Crazy Moon

2011-05-20T08:03:00.001-07:00

(Allan Eastman, 1987)
A young Kiefer Sutherland, eccentric scion of a distant and imperious Daddy Warbucks, falls in with a cute deaf woman, very appealingly played by Vanessa Vaughn. They do fun things together while learning how to communicate, until circumstances threaten to tear them apart. The best things about this movie are the moments of quirky vulgarity - Sutherland gets a lot of expressive mileage out of a stolen mannequin, and his hobby is taking photos of piles of shit - and the romance itself, which is very satisfying, right down to the improbable happy ending. I enjoyed it a lot and can see why Siue watched it four times as a kid. There are some annoying tonal issues - Kiefer's parents are anomalously predictable and broadly played, especially his stepmom - but most distracting for me was the handling of Vaughn's desire to speak. I have no problem with her character's aspirations in themselves, but if they are going to (subtly) problematize her deaf friends' disapproval of this, then they should damn well acknowledge the presumption of the hearing community in placing the burden of communication on her - especially her PARENTS, hello??? But it's very nice nonetheless. Poor Vaughn is saddled with the most hideously 80s wardrobe I can recall seeing in a movie.

Covergirl

2011-05-20T08:02:00.002-07:00

(Jean-Claude Lord, 1984)
This movie wears its production values on its sleeve, like a soup stain - the runway glamour sequences, the romantic dinner with fireworks, the (inexplicable) big production number at the climax, every last frame of it tinkles off the screen and dies wriggling on the floor. The whole movie exists to serve an impossibly uninvolving romance - the smart and independent up-and-comer falls for the fast-talking impresario in about five boring seconds, all he has to do is splash some money around and she melts. A halfway intelligent script would have at least had her hold off until he stopped being quite such a callow asshole - but as things stand, that blessed moment never arrives. The substance abuse and sexual predation and corporate backstabbing and even the depressive's suicide are entirely of a piece with the jacuzzi-wrestling sequence: not 'realism', much less social commentary, just foxy decadence to shovel the housewives, who to their credit were discriminating enough not to give a damn. Even Stratford icon William Hutt is reduced to a production value; the camera treats him with the same yawning leer that it accords the cardboard box servant-robot, who acts as a visual metaphor for the soul-destroying lifelessness of the production as a whole.

The Corpse Eaters

2011-05-20T08:02:00.001-07:00

(Donald R. Passmore/Klaus Vetter, 1974)
This movie, made in Sudbury, Ontario on the initiative of the local drive-in proprietor and then sold into oblivion to an unscrupulous distributor, is a legendary, almost-lost piece of Canadian horror history. Some dudes and dudettes interrupt their beach party (well, actually 'rock party' since we're in Shield country here) to explore an abandoned mining town's cemetery. One oaf uses this occasion to conduct a half-remembered Satanic rite he learned from his dad, and then...while this is definitely a cheap, amateurish, and clunky piece of work, it is pretty cool in spite of or maybe because of it: it's got an attitude and an imagination. The grimy texture of the location footage gives it a you-are-there feel that can be pretty creepy. The cannibalism sequences are way more lurid and detailed than the run of horror schlock from this era (somebody's mom must have complained, hence the 'warning' gimmick appended to these bits). The jaded undertaker is even more amusing and motivating than the very Sudburyesque young folks who incite the action. And because they had no obligations to the big boys, the filmmakers roll credits around the one-hour mark, instead of padding things out endlessly to fill out the running time. Goofy and creepy in equal measures, and quite memorable.

Control

2011-05-20T08:01:00.000-07:00

(Giuliano Montaldo, 1987)
The first half of this movie is exactly the kind of demeaning, insufferable tripe that gives international coproductions a bad name, as a stupefying assemblage of nominal humans interact amid a twenty-day bomb shelter habitation experiment. They observe procedures, they state philosophical positions, they get the hots for each other, at such length and with such cloying predictability that you want to strangle them, especially the goddam little boy. In the second half they throw a nominal curve, rescuing us from the filmmakers' self-imposed purgatory with a bit of action and intrigue. Finally, Papa Burt Lancaster intervenes with a stern lecture on moral themes. The moral - fallout shelters are no answer to the insanity of nuclear war - is hard to gainsay, but the delivery is so full of finger-wag it recalls the worst offenses of late Chaplin. Then you read the box, and the first sentence gives it away: "CONTROL is a disaster movie." Of course! For all its high-mindedness, this is another bunch of international celebrities playing not characters but unidimensional Types, marking time until the Peril arrives, then trotting out the door afterwards to absorb the Moral and cash their cheques. My only excuse for not noticing this is that everybody else stopped using this template about ten years earlier, for the excellent reason that it always, always sucks! There are less aggravating ways to save the planet, that's for sure.

Confidential

2011-05-20T08:00:00.004-07:00

(Bruce Pittman, 1986)
Again, here's a slick piece of hackwork that shows an improbable knowledge of film history. The generic noir trappings are familiar and somewhat unsatisfying, splitting the difference between fine period detail and a super-defined, slickly abstracted visual sensibility that reminds me more than anything of "The Big Crimewave". There's also a nod to "Psycho" in the protagonist-rotation at the end of the first act, and a you-do-the-math final shot that actually invokes "Citizen Kane". The plot machinations can be enjoyable although the stakes are depressingly low, and they should have kept us with the protagonists, OUTSIDE the walls of that scary old house: maybe they didn't want to play the country-folk-as-Other game, but it was a bad decision to drop the aura of mystery for a bunch of questionable domestic drama. And producer Anthony Kramreither just can't make a movie without slathering on the strippers to no great purpose. Still, it's got a good eye for detail and some cool moments.

Concrete Angels

2011-05-20T08:00:00.003-07:00

(Carlo Liconti, 1987)
This movie is 'about' a buncha young punks starting a band at the height of Beatlemania. As such, it should be an insufferable piece of sixties nostalgia. But in fact the band subplot is the worst thing about it, and almost an afterthought: the filmmakers certainly show minimal interest or skill at showing the internal dynamics of learning to play rock and roll, unmistakably dubbing their heroes with session-musician hacks playing a mere notch or two below their true level. Otherwise, the depiction of growing up Italian at Vaughan and St. Clair is as specific as it sounds, and totally disarming in its sense of distance and modesty. These things happen, then these other things happen, and the script is blessedly free of pat resolutions whether it's dealing with romance or violence or substance abuse or even, fleetingly, pedophilia. And the visual conception is full of surprising deadpan moments, from a waiting-room couch observed at Jarmusch-like middle distance to a pay phone conversation that actually seems to reference Taxi Driver. Not that this is an 'art' movie; just a made-to-order commercial project with a surprising understanding of how a movie is supposed to work, undermined by the jam scenes and, perhaps, by performances you mostly wish were just a little less functional.

Coming Out Alive

2011-05-20T08:00:00.001-07:00

(Don McBrearty, 1980)
In between "Hot Wheels" and "American Nightmare" - both better than this - McBrearty generated this skimpy actioner about a psycho dad kidnapping his wheelchair-bound son for nefarious ends. What's here is actually mostly great: Helen Shaver does well as the mother, upstaged only by Scott Hylands as Jocko the Bounty Hunter; he's complex, compelling and multi-dimensional. The direction is assured and kinetic, and the movie surges forward in an engaging way. And then, suddenly, it ends. And you're like, that's IT? After priming us for a scenario involving international corruption, world leaders and an exploding wheelchair, all we get is two guys punching each other out on a goddam boat? One of whom, the dad, has not been permitted an iota of character development in his fleeting seconds of screen time? We never learn what the hell he's all about, a really major letdown given that the secondhand pieces the other characters feed us promises something really juicy. He's just MICHAEL IRONSIDE, they seem to tell themselves, so of course he's one-dimensionally psychotic, what more do you need! This gross omission manages to torpedo the substantial good will generated by the fine second act. Why not save some of the cleverness to find a way out of the inevitable budgetary bind? Maybe they ran out of time as well as money. Whatever happened, it's a real waste.

The Clown Murders

2011-05-20T07:59:00.001-07:00

(Martyn Burke, 1976)
Not the movie you'd expect from the title - a fascinating hybrid that, ultimately, loses its grip. Produced toward the front end of the tax shelter boom - whence the CFDC adjusted their funding priorities to favor 'commercial' projects which might, har har, make back some of their investment - here you can still see some push-back from the frustrated artist types over the transition. Yes dear friends, this is a polo club "Goin' Down the Road", a buncha upper-class hosers doin' dumb shit, with a dumbfounding mutation around halfway into some kind of a psychodrama about machismo. Guns guns guns, gab gab gab, and some guy in a clown mask who avenges the class-conscious kidnapping which provides the film with its nominal plot. Just which guy is not ever spelled out, but he's gotta be one of the two farm hands, so the mystery angle is not that gripping. The rampage is clearly some kind of metaphor to literalize the anti-development message, loaded with highly portentous shots of condo towers adjoining the fallow fields. In fact, that's the only way you can (maybe) make the film work, as metaphor; each of three caperers are allotted exactly one character trait, which is better than they can do for the two perversely 'romantic leads,' who are utterly inexplicable: who decided that a kidnapping would be a jolly lark? Why does she pick such a weird moment to seduce John Candy? Candy symbolically rolls around and bawls for about ten minutes after that incident, so we're in the realm of CriTique here; it's not supposed to be thrilling, for that would be base. Instead it's a critique of thrills. Would YOU invite a critique of thrills over for dinner? With Al Waxman as the cop.

Class of 1984

2011-05-20T07:58:00.000-07:00

(Mark Lester, 1982)
Superficially, this is yet another virtuous-fammy-man-mops-up-the-scumbags jobber in the Death Wish mold. But there's a leap simply in the setting, because by recasting the opposition as teacher-versus-students, the framework takes on an almost inevitable sense of burlesque. Certain ugly potentials are avoided thanks to the upper-class pedigree of Punk One (and honestly, this movie is only 'punk' because the costumes look better that way). Furthermore, teach is not exactly catharsized by hanging Punk One from the ceiling of the recital, although it's still just nihilist bullshit instead of macho bullshit. But it's pretty great bullshit nonetheless; it encourages you to turn your brain off, and the performers are totally into it. It's even kind of prescient. Metal detectors and security guards at a high school? It is to die. Gotta love Roddy McDowell's car bursting into flames in the belly of the beast, Yonge and Elm! "Deadly Eyes" fans will be happy to see that movie's love interests showing up here, as the lead dyke-punk and the speed-freak pole-diver, respectively. With Al Waxman as the cop.

City on Fire

2011-05-20T07:57:00.000-07:00

(Alvin Rakoff, 1979)
This lateral-inferno disaster movie seems to think that its lack of seriousness is a virtue - it wants to be a lark. Producer Harold Greenberg even snags Corman/Pam Grier veteran Jack Hill to write the script, a good start. And then, in his infinite wisdom, Greenberg entrusts the enterprise to Alvin Rakoff, who wouldn't know a lark if it shat in his beer. Ten-thumbed and crosseyed, Rakoff spends 106 minutes showcasing a peerless inability to establish a character, direct an actor, stage a scene. A gratuitously complex multi-tiered narrative disappears bit by bit into the only elements these tremorous hands can grasp, to wit: "Get everyone into the hospital! Get everyone out of the hospital!" The existential despair this plot arc evokes is written all over the performers' faces, from Jonathan "what's my motivation" Welsh to Henry "fire my agent" Fonda, whose transparent, head-shaking contempt for this project proves once again that he is a man of the people.

Circle of Two

2011-05-20T07:56:00.002-07:00

(Jules Dassin, 1980)
Hollywood blacklistee Dassin's final film is a serious and thoughtful attempt to portray a platonic love affair between a precocious teenager and a soused painter. Well, the painter isn't actually much of a souse himself, but he is played in glassy-eyed fashion by a 1980 Richard Burton, so you do the math. Tatum O'Neal holds up her end though, and I found myself rooting for this movie right to the end. But there's way too much next-mark pacing around in the staging, Paul Hoffert's score is a nightmare about corn syrup, and utlimately the film's thesis says more about unhappy old men than it does about twinkly young women: its lament for lost youth is thick and maudlin even if it is surprisingly moral. There's a subtle hint in the scene where Burton laments his agent's rejection of portraiture for newfangled modernity; you can just hear the filmmakers indignantly defending their work on the same dubious, fogeyish grounds. I'd expect an old master like Dassin to be above such things, but this is another example of Canadian cinema eating its auteurs for breakfast.

Champagne for Two

2011-05-20T07:56:00.001-07:00

(Lewis Furey, 1987)
What happens to the director of a happy accident like "The Mask" a quarter of a century on? Well if you're Julian Roffman you ensconce yourself as the writer of a big-news event in Canadian entertainment: 'Shades of Love', a string of classy soap operas with a 'modern' outlook and the biggest hacks available for the price. Furey does duty here, showcasing the tribulations of the ambitious career gal who cannot slow down to love. This kind of dares you to call it a name: is escapist schlock for women any more offensive than cathartic schlock for men? Especially with performances as acceptable and direction as clever as this? Well, maybe not. But while it may be clever it's not good; Nicholas Campbell's 'breaking and entering' intro cannot possibly be effective through all the gauze, the power feminism smacks into the usual monogamy wall even if it addresses real issues, and to the extent Campbell and Kirsten Bishop do their job, it's against the undertow of a script that rushes them from conflict to resolution to conflict with positively mathematical banality. By the third or fourth vacuous easy-listening montage, you start to long for the things that money can't buy.

Cathy's Curse

2011-05-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

(Eddy Matalon, 1977)
As a piece of craftsmanship, this piece of shit gives "Things" a run for its money. Even apart from the atrocious condition of the near-slash print they transferred the DVD from, the thing moves like a stuttering rhinoceros; the actors wouldn't pass muster in the Bancroft community theatre; the special effects amount to fishing line and jump cuts; and the plot is such a seventies possessed-brat rehash that it barely registers. Nonetheless, I'm telling you, this movie is creepy. For all its transparent ludicrousness, and without anything remotely resembling an inspired artistic gesture, it hit me in the subconscious like a half-remembered bad dream. Matalon's subsequent feature, "Blackout", alchemically transformed ambition and production values (of a sort) into crippling liabilities. This one turns abject failure into something that I can't shake off. Call me a fool, but I may even watch it again, and with the lights on.

Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland

2011-05-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

(Raymond Jafelice, 1987)
I'm being as generous as I can possibly be: up a point because I'm not a five-year-old girl, up another point for the half-masticated Lewis Carroll iconography it rides in on, and one more big point for the overtones of 80s-psychedelia in the design work, most especially the head-bending Cheshire Cat (composed of garish patterns that stay stationary as he moves around). But five-year-old girls are smarter than the makers of this film believe. There is clear evidence here as in all Care Bears of the kind of sane and sensible child-psychologist redrafting that usually leads to cringing banality - it's just more visible here because it clashes so alarmingly with the source material. What is a moral like 'don't accept rides from strangers' doing in an Alice in Wonderland adaptation, no matter how loose? Alice accepted DRUGS from strangers for God's sake, but these guys won't even let anyone follow the rabbit down the hole unless he's someone's uncle. And the Queen is transformed from murderous tyrant into some kind of doting Angela Lansbury surrogate. I won't, however, claim that this tripe is any more damaging to the youth of today (or, er, whenever) than the stuff it bowdlerizes - like I said, kids are smart. But...there's no getting around it, you know? Care Bears are annoying!

Captive Hearts

2011-05-20T07:53:00.002-07:00

(Paul Almond, 1987)
This movie barely wriggles in its strait jacket of stultifying cliche. Am I supposed to forgive this inert catalogue of plot points because it's an '80s movie'? Or because it's based on a true story? In real life, was one of the two downed soldiers a one-dimensional racist lout, and the other a wide-eyed angel? In real life were they really at such pains to enact the 'in our culture, this is how we a) bathe b) use chopsticks c) kiss under mistletoe' routine that can be seen in every single other movie ever made on the subject? Were the lovers really this boring? And furthermore: was the noble Allied soldier really rescued from certain death by a trained hawk clawing off the scowling baddie's face? Are we supposed to cheer now? The only 80s points they get are by default: everyone loves Pat Morita, and as long as he's on screen we are at least granted some relief from the asinine puppy-love antics.

Cannibal Girls

2011-05-20T07:53:00.001-07:00

(Ivan Reitman, 1973)
This is a silly, ugly, messy movie that looks like the archetypal early 70s piece of shit horror movie, see title for concept. But I'm not (only) being partisan when I assert that it is completely transformed by the presence of Andrea Martin and Eugene Levy as the terrorized-couple protagonists. More specifically, it's the decision to base the film on almost entirely improvised dialogue, delivered by people who know how to do it - in place of stiff amateurs struggling to regurgitate their scripts, we get lovely bits of random shtick. Plus a few stiff amateurs of course. And the usual third-act how the hell do we wrap this up routine, rather more chronically incoherent than usual. So while I'm still dubious that Reitman deserves his Order of Canada campaign, I'm impressed that there is in fact a distinct and interesting sensibility engaging us through the wreckage here. Talent-incompetence and comedy-horror as twin dichotomies, both battling each other to a watchable draw.

Caged Terror

2011-05-20T07:51:00.000-07:00

(Barrie McLean/Kristin Weingartner, 1973)
When I was in school I made a film about a couple roaming around in the trees and talking, and I realized halfway through editing that this was not just a failing aesthetic strategy but a cliche of Canadian cinema: sodden lyricism married to vacant, metaphor-burdened stabs at social commentary. But whatever my own film's failings I feel much better after seeing this...this...thing. For one thing, mine ran 20 minutes, not 85, and had more content at that: every pointless bit of business here is fawned over for four, five, six relentless minutes. The male lead is just incredible, a brow-beating, loudmouthed creep given to outbursts of drama-class improv in between philosophical insights culled from the U of T pub, and he is given lots and lots of space to make us hate him. Admittedly if he weren't an asshole then the third act would make even less sense, as a couple snarky dudes show up to provide distant and thoroughly unhelpful echoes of 'exploitation' values; but it doesn't make it any easier to watch the caged creep whimper "please" in closeup until the magazine runs out.

The Brain

2011-04-30T07:24:00.001-07:00

(Ed Hunt, 1988)
I've been saying it for a while, and this movie really clinches it: Ed Hunt is the Ed Wood of Canada, marrying high foolishness and high seriousness to arrive at a cinema of impossible, jaw-slackening hilarity. This one depicts a local TV pop psychologist who promotes 'independent thinking' but is in fact acting as a front for a grinning, wheezing brain in an aquarium who wants to take over the world. On a thematic level, then, this would appear to be an attempted commercial vulgarization of 'Videodrome', and the fact that attempting this even occurred to them is in itself a marvel. But the brain sometimes gets impatient with his underlings, at which point he projects himself out of the lab and goes around eating people with his sharp pointy teeth, growing bigger each time until by the end he resembles (and may in fact be) a rubber halloween mask on a forklift. There is varied, priceless mayhem throughout: a daughter stabs her mom with scissors before falling out a window, a cop gets decapitated, a handyman gets sawed in half, and the hallucination stuff is great and ends way too soon. And after all this we get a climax involving George Buza in a white smock running down the same hallway three times. Very, very easy to ridicule, but just like Wood its absurdity generates so much entertainment value that you have to give it some serious respect. The world would be a much worse place without these guys chasing their muse in dizzy circles. So while its utter extremity demands to be rewarded with a one-star rating, it is as masterfully one-star as a one-star movie can be.

Blue Monkey

2011-04-30T07:23:00.001-07:00

(William Fruet, 1987)
The first thing to note about this goofy movie is that it looks like a TV show. It is composed and conceived very small. This is a disorienting thing in a movie about a giant mutant insect terrorizing a "Love Boat"-like hospital with a salad of Canadian performers doing their shtick - whoops, there's Joe Flaherty and Robin Duke! Here comes expert etymologist Ron Lake from the Snuggles commercials! And the dead giveaway, Steve Railsback. Why does the flower-borne plague suddenly stop asserting its prerogative a half hour into the movie? Why oh why does everyone stand around staring at the thing that wants to kill them? Oh well - it has all the atmosphere of Street Legal, but I suppose I should relax and let goofy be goofy.

Blood Relations

2011-04-30T07:22:00.000-07:00

(Graeme Campbell, 1988)
This slick horror-mindfuck about nasty people engaged in a perversely circular murder plot is "witty" and "intelligent" - it rubs your nose in its cutesy cleverness. For a while it's amusing and disconcerting how everyone talks openly and twinklingly about their sinister plans, but a horror movie can't survive on irony alone; every time there's an opening for actual emotional engagement you get shoved back to arms-length, and eventually you just stop caring. The cocktail-party smugness also smothers any potential for actual sensuality in the film's disarmingly omnipresent sexual rhetoric, while the tentative stabs at discourse on the mind-body split only call attention to the fact that Campbell is no Cronenberg in the visionary perversity department. The main selling point is Jan Rubes, having a field day as the opera-singing brain surgeon patriarch, but in situ even he gets cancelled out by the smirking Kevin Hicks, who acts like he's auditioning for a cop show. Lead schemer Lydie Denier just can't keep her clothes on and does keep a straight face, but her gold-digger routine is too stupidly transparent to be convincing. The big ending isn't much of a surprise and doesn't land with the intended wallop, not because we don't 'care about the characters' but because by then things have become so utterly lopsided toward flash and effect that character is barely relevant.

Big Meat Eater

2011-04-30T07:20:00.002-07:00

(Chris Windsor, 1982)
What happened to Chris Windsor? This is the person's only mention on imdb. And I hate to be a spoilsport, but I'm pretty sure Chris Windsor doesn't have a park in Edmonton named after him, but Big Miller does, and so he should have treated the poor man with a little respect. If you're going to make the Big Black Guy a homicidal Muslim, at least have some follow through man, he spends the last three quarters of the movie just glowering...and grudging. There are real charms to this camped-up, eccentric-with-a-capital-T musical-retro-comedy about a suburban town called Burquitlam that is beseiged by alien wind-up dolls that must be vanquished by this British-sounding guy's science project. But it doesn't cohere, it has some trouble with smug and empty, and back-to-back viewings with Big Crimewave do it no favours.

The Big Crimewave

2011-04-30T07:20:00.001-07:00

(John Paizs, 1985)
This one hits the bulls eye. Carrying the standard early for the Winnipeg Weirdos, only it fetishizes the 50s the way Maddin fetishizes the 20s. It's bright and squeaky, it's consistently hilarious, and all the more so because it's also got perfectly balanced malevolent undertones. Almost a silent film, narrated by a 12-year old girl who says that writers-blocked tenant Paizs is "a quiet man" in the perfect mannered 12-year-old fashion, hooray for Eva Kovacs! With the whole movie revolving around stylized enactments of the guy's reject drafts, and with the retro production design color-saturated to the hilt, it's very arty, but it's arty in a way that's engineered for maximum entertainment value. And did I mention that it's consistently hilarious?

Bear Island

2011-04-30T07:19:00.000-07:00

(Don Sharp, 1979)
Grade A Competency Perplex, a movie designed to show off explosions and murders and snowmobile chases across majestic Northern wastelands, but it just sits there like a lump. All-star cast runs around acting furtive, there's a lot of chit chat about Commies and Nazis, and I guess the main selling point is supposed to be that jolly old Lloyd Bridges turns out to be a homicidal maniac! But in the Soviet Union they had a description of certain MOR productions as "grey cinema", and I can't think of a better way to describe this.

Bad Manners

2011-04-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

(Robert Houston, 1984)
Not sure what exactly is Canadian about this one - set in sunny California, it depicts the antics and jailbreak of a bunch of foul-mouthed orphans who go to rescue their friend from his adoptive parents - played with gusto and extreme blandness by Karen Black and Martin Mull, respectively. This is a staunchly anti-authoritarian piece of filmmaking, with overlays of 80s raunch-comedy thrust into the hands of pre-pubescent actors, in a strict Us Vs. Them setup against the grotesque representatives of the adult world. I'm into that. What's weird is what happens when this goes anywhere near race issues - like the icky Spanish maid, or the black kid named Blackie who says "You're a racist? That's all right - I'm a racist too." Ugh! The ninja kid is pretty bad too (he eats a raw fish head) but that's partially redeemed by a funny gag where his ninja friends want him to come out to play. Oh, all right I'll be forgiving- it's pretty funny.

Autumn Born

2011-04-30T07:17:00.000-07:00

(Lloyd A. Simandi, 1979)
This raises the bar - for the rest of the project the big question became, "Is this the VERY worst Canadian film?" (Answer: astonishingly, no.) Even if Dorothy Stratten wasn't long murdered, it would be revolting to watch her put through these punishing paces, as a carefree heiress who is sent to some kind of mind-control school where she's locked in the cellar, whipped, smacked around and manipulated until she's docile and compliant. For one thing, at this date she has no business being forced to act - she's really bad. For another thing...well, the Canadian Cinematic Vampire has stolen off with any potential for energy or camp the project might have held, leaving us with a turgid, creepy, porny lump that is comically endless, stiff as a rod, and completely bereft of point - unless the point is to pull a Clockwork Orange jobber on people who like looking at pretty naked women.

Atlantic City

2011-04-30T07:16:00.000-07:00

(Louis Malle, 1980)
Set in America, director's French, and in spite of the secondary casting (Al Waxman as a cokehead! Moses Znaimer as a thug!! Bob Goulet as himself!!!) the judicious sprinkling of the word "Saskatchewan" calls to mind not the Capital Cost Allowance but the Canadian Cooperation Agreement. (cf. Pierre Berton, "Hollywood's Canada"). Spiritually, this isn't a Canadian movie, it's just a movie. A really, really good movie. 31 flavors of 'loser' wander the seaboard in the days when Atlantic City still had some character left to lose - what a bizarre, chaotic place this was, and the lament against elephantitis is all the more poignant with hindsight. Anyway, the movie is about the complicated struggle of these people to get by in this place, and all are viewed with compassion and (distanced) sympathy - even the thugs. When you're supposed to laugh you laugh, when there's supposed to be tension or excitement you feel it, this thing holds your attention. If this isn't Lancaster and Sarandon at their very best then please tell me where to find better.

Apprentice to Murder

2011-04-30T07:15:00.000-07:00

(Ralph L. Thomas, 1987)
Ooh, it's based on a true story, and it's about death and ghosts. It's got Donald Sutherland as a charismatic healer who takes young Chad Jones under his wing as they stalk the creepy guy in the old house who they think is a demon. Sounds promising, even stays promising for a few minutes, after-school-special ambience and all. But this promise is an even better reason to get infuriated as things turn to shit, logic flies out the window and all characters are drained of sympathy by doing stupid thing after stupid thing. Why does Jones' hottie girlfriend exhibit even this much patience with the clod? Isn't it, like, an obvious cheat to keep showing the creepy guy look aggressively menacing from a low angle, and then when the big confrontation comes at the end he's all meek and chatty? I don't care if I'm spoiling; this is Competence Paradox filmmaking at its worst, and will make you grind your teeth in abject frustration, should you happen to watch it, which you won't.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

2011-04-30T07:14:00.002-07:00

(Ted Kotcheff, 1974)
Now here is a movie where competence is real and very much beneficial - abetted by the source material, of course, but there was no reason for it to translate as beautifully as it does. Very often tragic and hilarious at one and the same time, Kotcheff is sure-handed and confident and in control. The first asset - pretty much perfect performances by a top-tier cast from our nation and theirs - doesn't dominate so much that you overlook the remarkable accumulation of detail that is going on in the background. This is an immersive tour of Jewish life in Montreal at a certain time - in repose I'm finding myself recollecting the smells of individual scenes, always a sign that someone's thought things through. But of course it wouldn't be Richler without the smart-ass asides, piled on at a blinding pace that never feels unduly rushed. The greatest of these is of course "Happy Bar Mitzvah Bernie", a note-perfect attack on the film culture state policy was leaving behind at this time, and it's such a perfect skewering of pretentious self-centered bullshit that it didn't even occur to me to feel defensive.

Angela

2011-04-30T07:14:00.001-07:00

(Boris Sagal, 1978)
Here is a working definition of 'melodrama.' You'd think a movie about a woman meeting, falling in love with, and fucking her long-lost orphan son would have, you know, plot twists, but nothing whatsoever happens that isn't telegraphed in the first five minutes; such niceties would be a distraction from watching housewife turned glamorous restaurateur Sophia Loren suffer her way around Montreal in various nice outfits. Nothing particularly wrong with her performance, or with John Huston as the rather ill-defined heavy who lumbers in from time to time. But I can't really work up much interest in John Vernon's surly son of a bitch husband, or the already-doomed Steve Railsback as the callow and twinkly love interest/son. And the obvious potential for thrilling perversion is shorted out by the usual gray banality. Shot in 1978, released in 1984, looks like 1972, and kudos to the Canadian government for their generous contribution to the retirement fund of Sagal, an all-time Hollywood hack.

Alien Warrior

2011-04-30T07:13:00.001-07:00

(Ed Hunt, 1985)
If Tax Shelter films are supposed to be so single-minded about filling the needs of the market, how do things like this happen? One possible answer: by trying to be all things to all people. In short, this is a sci-fi blaxploitation Christ parable for kids, with rape scenes. The resultant hash may be laughably wrong, but it's also majorly entertaining in a distinctly Edwoodian way. A plethora of car chases, foot chases, fist fights, knife fights, and gun fights alternate with the burly E. T. helping playmate Pamela Saunders run a literacy center over the objections of her useless boyfriend. As anyone who sees this will tell you, there are three untoppable highlights: the building of the car, the karate chopping of the stop sign in slow motion, and the Tipper Gore Memorial Graffiti Wall. None of these highlights involve the pimp stuff, which is pretty fucking painful in more ways than one. Still, better complete enveloping chaos than suffocating competency, and the Viral Gentility Effect doesn't get any more gloriously self-defeating than this.

American Nightmare

2011-04-30T07:12:00.000-07:00

(Don McBrearty, 1983)
Anthony Kramreither is back in the producer's chair, and he brought the strippers with him, in this Argento-style whodunit-with-gore (which actually predates "All In Good Taste"). But this time he also brought a director, and the result is an interesting, watchable movie. The most fascinating thing about it is its single-minded class consciousness - the cops, the media and the millionaires on one side, the strippers and sex workers and queers on the other, with a lapsed bougie pianist poking his nose into the underworld on our behalf. The underlighting is ugly instead of evocative, people do stupid things to make themselves available for slaughter, and things fall apart at the end - the crazed killer yammers on for SO fucking long about his motivation you want Eli Wallach to pop out of a bathtub and shoot him. But the women (and the gay guy) are extremely sympathetic and detailed, and the rather pathetic gore effects (a prop knife that squirts blood and that's about it) have the effect of de-emphasizing the sadism that comes with the genre. Someone on the writing team did some kind of research, that's for sure - from the authentically awful stand up comic to the anxious husband to the idle talk about forming a stripper's union, this sure ain't "Exotica".

The Amateur

2011-04-30T07:11:00.000-07:00

(Charles Jarrott, 1981)
A kind of jet-setting Death Wish for Dummies (!!!). Computer wonk's wife gets murdered by Commie terrorists, and so he must lurk behind the Iron Curtain to serve up some Savage Justice. Only the terrorists aren't really Commies - they're CIA employees! Sounds fraught with resonance and dramatic possibility, you're saying to yourself - now all it needs is John Savage in the lead and the guy who directed the Lost Horizon remake. Oh and Christopher Plummer flitting about the margins for no discernible reason except to show off his Werner Klemperer impersonation (and, oh yeah, to appease the CFDC). This subverts the Competency Paradox by the simple expedient of not being competent - nothing scenes stretched to the breaking point, inexcusable lapses in logic (why don't those 500 snipers just bag the guy after he shoots his hostage?), and big-idea set pieces - shootout in a chandelier warehouse? Luxury swimming pool explodes into tiki bar? - that oughta direct themselves, but not with Jarrott back there scratching his head. And the expose of the military-industrial complex would have been a lot more effective if the Lone Man Against The System weren't such a boring asshole.

All In Good Taste

2011-04-30T07:10:00.000-07:00

(Anthony Kramreither, 1983)
Kramreither did more producing than directing, and in case the question of 'why' was eating at your guts...this one is a proud exemplar of the Art Is Bunk school of taxshelterology: a fellow wanting to make a film exposing the injustices of 'child placement agencies' is frustrated at every turn by producers who want him to make a movie about strippers. Who writes this stuff? For the final half-hour, the answer is 'nobody', as the putative narrative turns into a totally plotless stripper montage/travelogue - London! Vienna! Rio! Tokyo! Freelton! (Freelton?!) - interrupted with very occasional dumcracks from the guy (Harvey Atkin) who these days is voicing the Bell Sympatico beaver. So why is Jim Carrey's mug on the front cover? Ah but that would be telling.

Abducted

2011-04-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

(Boon Collins, 1986)
The general cinematic condition this load of hooey illuminates is Viral Gentility, and I doubt I'll find a purer example out there, because this movie is so basic as to be almost elemental. A BC-based stab at the Hick Rape film of the Last House/I Spit On Your Grave/Deliverance tendency, it keeps tripping over the cop in its head: no matter how many times the guy growls about how he's going to beat up/rape/murder the heroine, and no matter how many times she asks politely to be let go, it's never a prelude to anything more than a rock climbing lesson, or instruction on how to prepare a rabbit for cooking. And when we run out of basic survival skills lessons, the guy curls up in a fetal position and starts crying. Then we get a few tourist bureau shots of Kootenay flora and fauna. Then before we know it they're back to growling and whining, defying all logic and motivation. Then, suddenly, GRIZZLY FUCKING ADAMS shows up - the real thing, Dan Haggerty, as the hick's home-schooling dad - but even him leering at this teenage jogger's boobs can't interrupt the Beckett-like rhythm of mind-boggling nothingness. Attempts at a conservation message fit in like Al Gore at a brothel. Imagine Faster Pussycat remade by a frat boy Hal Hartley on downs and you're getting warm.

UPDATE - INCOMING!!!

2011-04-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

Folks,

As has been transpiring for months, my immersion in production of my monstrous film project "Taking Shelter" (see below) has thoroughly inhibited me from writing any new reviews for Cinertia. The summer months will see a quantum of catch-up, picking up where I left off (the execrable "Skull: A Night of Terror") and continuing down the alphabet from there. No promises as to exactly when this will happen, but it's coming, I can assure you of that.

However, I know you are all out there dying for more. So I have a treat for you. For a full two years before I began this blog, I was reviewing films in the margins of my personal blog, including many, many Canadian movies. So, as a gift to my flock, I'm going to start posting those reviews here.

With these early reviews especially, it should be kept in mind that I am just getting to know the field, as well as finding my legs as a writer; the judgments are often less than final. I'll be revisiting these alongside the new titles and seeing how my reportage stands up as I move toward a less ephemeral print rendition of these judgments. In the mean time, these will be at least a fun and informative way to pass the time! Lots more to come. Enjoy - JC

A brief commercial message

2011-04-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

ONLY 10 DAYS LEFT! ORDER NOW!

Hi friends -

As many of you know, I have been working for several years on a feature length collage of vintage Canadian movies, entitled "Taking Shelter". (I also plan on adapting the reviews on this blog into a book about the movies of the same era). Since receiving an Ontario Arts Council grant last year I have pursued this project full-time, and it has become a consuming passion for me.

It is also an incredibly involved and complicated project, and one that has taken longer to complete than anticipated. In short, my artist fee has run out, and I am broke.

Therefore, I am inviting you to support this project through a funding drive I have established on a site called IndieGoGo. Through this site, with your credit card, you may make donations to help me complete this project by early 2012 as planned!

Here is the site:

http://www.indiegogo.com/Taking-Shelter

Look at it this way: this is your opportunity to 'pre-order' copies of the movie at comradely rates. You may donate less or more according to your ability - the site details the many incentives I am offering for your money.

I know there's a lot of competition for your paycheque right now, and a lot of good causes out there. I am sufficiently committed to this project that I am asking you to consider this appeal among the many others that you have heard. I am creating something entirely new here, and the impact of this project is going to be huge once it is complete.

This is your chance to help me make it happen.

That site once more:

http://www.indiegogo.com/Taking-Shelter

Check it out!

my excuse

2010-12-15T18:10:00.000-08:00

Guys I'm still watching movies like crazy. And I am still committed to reviewing at least every Canadian movie I have seen this year. But my (top secret) parallel project relating to this material has a deadline, and this blog does not, and the deadline has been dictating my life. Please be patient with me! This blog will return full force in the new year.

Skull: A Night of Terror

2010-10-21T22:00:00.000-07:00

(Robert Bergman, 1987)
Superficially slick, writer-director Bergman gets in way over his head when he starts fussing up this simple revenge plot with his notions of human behaviour. The gang of murderous criminals is bad enough - Didn't they know Skull was a sadistic pedophile before they sprung him from jail? Why are they getting cold feet now? - and the attempts to complicate Robbie Rox's boneheaded characterization with phobias and frailties only serve to make him as incomprehensible as his cohorts. But those guys have nothing on Robert Bideman's cop, one of the most agonizingly stupid protagonists in the entire exploitation canon. An emotionally intelligent filmmaker might conceivably have kept us identifying with the schmuck as he accidentally shoots hostages, fucks around on his wife, lets mass murderers escape for no reason, and drives into a swamp instead of calling for backup, but as things stand he's just contemptible. As a result, when he finally goes into avenging-warrior mode, we wouldn't give a shit even if the routine didn't inexplicably reverse the trauma-based impotence which defines the guy's entire characterization to that point. By the end, you desperately want the gasoline-soaked Bideman to obey the laws of physics and go up in flames along with the exploding house he's two feet away from - or at least for his wife to kick him in the balls instead of accompanying him on his walk into the goddamned sunset.

Things

2010-10-21T21:31:00.000-07:00

(Andrew Jordan, 1989)
Forget "Strange Brew", "Fubar", even "Goin' Down The Road". This astonishing film is the ultimate hoser movie, because the beer-guzzling dimwits at issue are also in charge, although not in control. Disheveled and distracted, manically overstated without purpose or effect, constantly interrupted by a 'newscaster' porn star whose cue cards are way too far off to the side, the holy trinity of Barry Gillis, Bruce Roach and - my very favourite - Doug Bunston are just about the least motivated protagonists in cinema history. Hordes of bloodthirsty, inert papier-mache ants are erupting from the stomach of Bunston's wife, and yet these dudes are so into drinking beer, rifling the cupboards and making the stupidest of stupid wisecracks that they barely notice - until they have to a) take a leak or b) change a blown fuse, which banal endeavours comprise the entirety of this film's 'narrative'. A couple agonizing dream sequences and some alienated mad-scientist torture stuff barely register given the overwhelming discontinuity of this grimy, stuttering, grinding catastrophe of a movie. Those intrepid or stoned enough to stay seated, however, will find themselves utterly enthralled by the movie's unprecedented will to fail - every time you think it's explored every possible way to be bad, it comes up with something new.

Suzanne

2010-10-21T20:44:00.000-07:00

(Robin Spry, 1980)
This film dooms itself right out of the gate by boasting its status as a treatise on Anglo-Francophone relations, as embodied by Jennifer Dale's 50/50 babe. In fact the parade riot under the credits is absolutely the only onscreen incident in this multi-decade narrative where Dale is engaged in anything other than romantic entanglement. If she's with a friend, they talk exclusively about men; if she's got an enemy, it's because they like the same guy; if she gets a job she's not at it for fifteen seconds before one dude or the other comes charging in; she doesn't even get a one-on-one interaction with her fucking kid. No wonder the filmmakers run over her mother with a truck; this is a man's, man's, man's world, and the femme-free production team seem to be consciously laying the ground work for the Bechdel Test. Perhaps as a result, although there's nothing particularly wrong with Dale's performance, she comes off as considerably less interesting than her suitors, angelic Gabriel Arcand and devilish Winston Rekert, both of whom do well under the circumstances. Some individual scenes are well-observed, and Helen Hughes is a riot as Rekert's souse mom, but it's just not worth it.

Canada's Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks

2010-10-21T20:13:00.000-07:00

(Donald Brittain, 1985)
Deft, ironic, and scathing, this excellent film achieves the mythical synthesis of drama and documentary. One reason is that Brittain actually understands drama, and the many re-enactments and speculative dramatizations are achieved with a precision and wit that the wonderful cast could not have achieved without his steady hand. Further, where archival inserts and retrospective interviews can usually be counted on to drag such projects to a screeching halt, here the mixing of media actually adds energy to a narrative that would otherwise be rather heavy on the union meetings. One reason you notice the film's wondrous balance is that, regrettably, it eventually loses it - while the courtroom drama of the third act is better than most it remains courtroom drama, and for its duration the multiplicity of inputs is boiled down to a less than satisfying transcript. But even Brittain's occasionally pushy narration can't stop Maury Chaykin in his riveting performance as the common thug turned Commie-busting union boss - the film presents so much factual evidence of the guy's rampaging malevolence that Chaykin is free to concentrate on the endearing eccentricities that the absolutely powerful are free to indulge in. While Brittain's larger social critique unfolds in measured tones, you can't miss the parallel between Banks' goldfish and Jack Pickersgill's sausage dog.

Tell Me That You Love Me

2010-10-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

(Tzipi Trope, 1983)
Here we have something approaching Method soap opera - so felt and so nuanced that for a while you're fooled into thinking it's meaningful. The key is the agonizingly unresolved Andree Pelletier/Kenneth Welsh subplot, which foregrounds the issue of domestic abuse as an outcome of personal trauma and learned non-communication. In this context, the central marital breakdown between ambitious journalist Barbara Williams and jet-setting lawyer Nick Mancuso digs beneath its glamorous trappings and takes on some actual emotional power, attentively performed and mercifully free of hyperbole. The film is so true to its characters and situations that for a while it seems almost organic, embracing struggle amid chaos instead of the usual pat prescriptions. But after Mancuso leaves for New York Williams is saddled with too much meaningful gazing, and her own fleeting and unconvincing descent into abusiveness betrays the narrative's psychological complexities with the usual romance-versus-career trash. The predictable resolution is handled with a surprisingly light touch, but since neither Williams nor the audience has seen the slightest evidence of self-examination on Mancuso's part, it feels false anyway.

Storm

2010-10-20T22:38:00.000-07:00

(David Winning, 1987)
Made for zero money by a bunch of Calgary kids, this film has exactly one thing going for it, and that is its eccentric, amiable tone. It was an inspired choice to yank gawky nerd David Palfy out of the film's initial high school milieu and into a tense rural-thriller narrative, and his work is of a piece with the nasty, displaced, casually ironic direction. A prologue that comprises three guys glancing at each other in balaclavas for eight full minutes makes a surprising joke out of relentless overextension, but soon enough it becomes apparent that the joke's on the audience, because things never pick up - everything goes on far, far too long, with little payoff. The relationships and motivations are vague, the geography of the action ill-defined, the various cute props never exploited to their potential. The school sequence makes one joke, then takes ten minutes to make the same joke again. The narrative contrivances are incredible and annoying, and get more so as the movie goes on. And it's telling that in the first scene, two of the balaclava guys look so identical that I couldn't tell them apart until they unmasked. This is half a real movie at best.

Strange Brew

2010-10-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

(Rick Moranis/Dave Thomas, 1983)
Even in their sainted heyday, the SCTV gang could rarely navigate the rigors of an extended plotline. And that was with a full comic ensemble pushing from behind - here Moranis and Thomas are stranded at the head of an endless sea of failed straight men. You can literally see their spontaneous, improvisational working methods die on screen - they encourage countless little bits of business from Paul Dooley and Max von Sydow, but without an actual director at the helm or any comic verve to the performances, these barely catch your eye. Where the original routine was defined by its strict formal limits, this film plods through a formless and pushy narrative, some corporate hypno-espionage thing that takes up way too much space and limits the stars' creative elbow room. And where the McKenzie brothers originally conspired to take the piss out of the Canadian stereotypes they embodied, this movie's endless silly riffs on beer and hockey are lazy signifiers for the outside world and pandering, fist-pumping affirmations for the dumb louts these guys never really identified with in the first place.

Tanya's Island

2010-10-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

(Alfred Sole, 1980)
How do things like this happen? A barely-clad actress in a shitty relationship appears to have a dream that she's a barely-clad non-actress in a different shitty relationship, except on a desert island, where she befriends a gorilla. The point appears to be some kind of critique of civilization, as insufferable tortured artist Richard Sargent makes various rules and builds various Gilligan's Island-style bamboo cages to prohibit his bimbo prize (D. D. Winters a/k/a Vanity, which explains this movie's continued if nominal commercial existence) from exploring her 'savage', 'wild' inner nature with the gorilla. If the metaphoric thrust doesn't really parse, that's probably because Winters is almost totally vacant, a slack-jawed, ill-motivated baton to be passed between Sargent (who does at least hint at self-awareness with his hyperbolic wildman routine) and the hairy ape (a down-on-his-luck Rick Baker). The overall effect is akin to a softcore pornography ensemble suddenly dislocated to film school, with rampant pretensions that are both hilariously unearned and stretched to within an inch of their alleged life.

Summer's Children

2010-10-20T20:18:00.000-07:00

(Julius Kohanyi, 1979)
Brooding auto mechanic Thomas Hauff's quest to reunite with his once-beloved sister boasts a surprisingly effective flashback structure as well as an unusually apt fusion of social realist and exploitation modes - both the horseplay with the boys at work and the (awesome!) tours of Toronto city lights recall "Goin' Down the Road" even as the plot descends into a sensationalized tour of bookies, floozies, hit men, and telegraphed kink. Not that it's a thrill a minute - the pace remains confoundingly deliberate throughout, with long minutes dedicated to sour domestic exchanges with a health-nut girlfriend and a jazz DJ acquaintance. Even the flashbacks comprise little more than testy sibling interactions, packing little drama until you figure out what they're leading up to. And you do figure it out, which further dulls the impact of a damagingly under-realized climax. Still, there's something haunting about the peculiar mix of elements here; the dropped threads and dead ends add to a pervasive sense of disorientation that befits these lost, frustrated, questing characters, and if it ain't profound, it's still kind of mesmerizing.

Surfacing

2010-10-20T19:36:00.000-07:00

(Claude Jutra, 1981)
One nice thing about novels is they don't have theme songs - Ann Mortifee should have been deported for the disfiguring atrocity that bookends this nightmare adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 'classic'. I gather there's some metaphorical stuff about the mystery of Canadian identity buried here somewhere, but the filmmakers are clearly more interested in the gender angle, no doubt because characters are easier to market than symbols. Unfortunately, these characters remain hopelessly symbolic. I'll grant that the movie's primary concern is not why men are such insufferable bastards but why women are idiotic enough to put up with them, but we're still left with an evening full of bastards and idiots - R. H. Thomson's infantile sexist makes me reach for my revolver, Margaret Dragu shrieks when she's not whimpering, and Joseph Bottoms is impossibly vague from beginning to end. I suspect that the casting of hottie Kathleen Beller in the lead was driven by market imperatives as well - while she's not as hateful as her posse, stick her in a canoe and she comes off as exactly the lost, urbane Yankee she is. And if the ending isn't a profound act of violence against the source material, then an entire generation of Canadian literary critics have a lot to answer for.

The Surrogate

2010-10-20T19:14:00.000-07:00

(Don Carmody, 1984)
I like how the script keeps tossing off suggestively left-field details of character and motivation at the most improbable moments - it keeps you on your toes, just like the plethora of plausible suspects in the grisly-murder subplot that eventually catches up with the foreground action. And the pleasures of the casting only begin with duelling-uberbabes Shannon Tweed and Carole Laure, although of the top-tier supporting crew only Jackie Burroughs really gets a proper showcase (and how). The narrative's handling of its various psychosexual disorders is candidly lurid and preposterous, which is appropriate and fun - but also pandering, which is annoying. Gay guy Jim Bailey's stock camp mannerisms don't become any less tiresome when he's revealed as a secret skirt-chaser, especially given angry guy Art Hindle's unchecked 'faggot'-baiting. And while the across-the-board association of kink with psychosis is probably meant to set judgmental straights up for the surprise ending, the ploy doesn't work, mainly because the surprise is preposterous in a bad way - contrived, arbitrary, and laborious.

Stone Cold Dead

2010-10-15T10:32:00.000-07:00

(George Mendeluk, 1979)
While it doesn't come close to living up to its ambitions, this police-and-prostitutes procedural does have something going on upstairs. In telling the tale of the murderous hooker-hater with the camera that is also a gun, Mendeluk aims for a vulgar existentialism, with generous shades of gray in the interplay between cops and criminals, and a surprising emotionalism - when Richard Crenna outs crooked partner Chuck Shamata he bursts into tears, and drug-smuggling kingpin Paul Williams (!!) seems to be channeling Brando as he mourns his junkie girlfriend or cries plaintively from the cell for his glasses. The surprise identity of the killer offers one more variation on the enemy-within theme as well as complicating the film's attitude toward sex workers, but it works (just a bit) better as ideology than as drama - in spite of the usual lengthy confession/explanation, this red herring doesn't pass the smell test. Part of the problem is that except for the anomalously earthy Crenna and tormented 'hostess' Linda Sorensen, none of these potentially compelling characters are on screen enough for us to invest much in them - their development is so stunted that the emotive high points seem to fall out of the sky. Because of this, when the big "Chinatown"-style defeatist ending comes down, it feels unsatisfying and unearned - just like the allusion to "Peeping Tom".

Slipstream

2010-10-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

(David Acomba, 1973)
Good fucking lord. Released within months of "Paperback Hero", it makes a striking contrast - it's as though Kier Dullea's deluded cowboy had taken up the director's chair. Luke Askew's DJ is a literal loner, perched in his prairie farmhouse and broadcasting his 'iconoclastic' selections - such as Van Morrison and "Layla" - in defiance of the station which wants him to play commercial crap a/k/a 'funk'. He does however find time to strike up a romance with part-time hippie Patti Oatman, in between run-ins with a hyperbolically villainous radio exec and a conniving newspaper columnist. When Oatman upbraids the guy for doing his job instead of making out again it looks like we're dealing with some kind of manhandled anti-capitalist statement, except after she leaves him she gets a job filing mail at the post office! No, the critique here is strictly limited to the media establishment, who get their jollies holding down this virile he-man individualist. You keep waiting for the artist-versus-straights rhetoric to show some sense of irony or proportion or realism, but all hope is lost after they symbolically ride their horse naked across the open plains - so overripe and self-aggrandizing it made me want to get a job.

Spanish Fly

2010-10-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

(Bob Kellett, 1976)
With its sunny seaside setting, its structural dependence upon four stunning if barely characterized fashion models, its general orientation toward high-living decadence, and its generously funded un-Canadianness, this is dangerously close to filmmaking as paid vacation. Only Terry-Thomas, doing a highly lived-in but still charming shtick as a pretender to upper-class twithood, suggests anything close to actual comic craft. His scenes with beleaguered servant Graham Armitage keep a happy arm's length from the innocuously smutty hijinks that dominate, although whenever he wanders off Armitage is grabbing some poor woman's ass in less than charming fashion, and Thomas himself feeds the beast with his aphrodisiac plonk-marketing strategy. The counterplot, concerning Leslie Phillips' horny henpecked husband, provokes not one thin smile, strip mining the most familiar and least charming of British comedy traditions. And even if you like this kind of thing, you're likely to get impatient with the long, formless scenes of extras dancing around and kids with butterfly nets.

Something About Love

2010-10-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

(Tom Berry, 1988)
Venturing into private-sector coproduction, the NFB issues forth a bizarrely lumpy and compromised variation on their usual naturalistic docudrama. Set in Cape Breton (although the whole cast speaks perfect Toronto English) and dealing earnestly with the issue of Alzheimer's, the presentation emphasizes the usual grainy verite-lite aesthetic, with low-key, character-based dramatics and passing commentary on domestic sexism and the violence of industry. But there's also an effort to inject this kitchen sink stuff with a different kind of populism, the commercial kind, rife with Hollywood high-rollers and high school sweethearts played by Jennifer Dale; things even stop dead at the halfway point for the big Motown production number that gives the film its title. The mesh doesn't take; the schmaltzy, pushy score stomps all over the modest dramatics, and Stefan Wodoslawsky looks lost and miserable in the lead role even though he helped write the script. He certainly can't cut it up against Jan Rubes, as masterfully charming as ever in the role of the afflicted undertaker dad. His big sentimental end speech is genuinely moving, and would have left a nice taste in the mouth if the filmmakers could have just let it be, but instead they piss all over it with a hamfisted opera-style Big Ending that epitomizes the production's unhappy confusion.

Spasms

2010-10-14T07:55:00.001-07:00

(William Fruet, 1982)
Fruet is smart enough to know what to do with a script concerning a telepathic Micronseian demon-snake: make a joke out of it. And given his filmmaking knowhow, it's a pretty good joke, well shot and well paced and outfitted with just enough mock-seriousness to be credible. Not that it's anything to write home about, of course. While they deliberately balance the stuff about the 'savages' with a subplot involving snake-handling Christian zealots on home turf, that thread gets lost well before the abortive climax; after all that fuss, it turns out you can defeat Evil by shooting it in the head. The surprisingly high-octane cast are all visibly in on the gag, but they don't mesh: Peter Fonda's doctor does laid back wink-wink, Kerrie Keane's big-haired love interest plays for constipated melodrama, and as the tormented game hunter Oliver Reed goes for such a high-serious hushed whisper that you can barely make out what he's saying. The film's main contribution to cinema is the Dick Smith-devised swelling snakebite gore effect, most spectacularly applied to Al Waxman's crusty mercenary. But it's the hilariously hysterical sorority house snake rampage that delivers the real payoff.

Spring Fever

2010-10-13T19:02:00.000-07:00

(Joseph L. Scanlon, 1981)
The utter wrongness of this vanity vehicle for tennis prodigy Carling Bassett starts with a sun-and-surf sex comedy packaging job that fails to even mention Bassett's name. And the fraudulence continues with the casting of Bassett as a working-class underdog - mommy Susan Anton is an oppressed Vegas showgirl - when her real-life daddy produced the thing himself under the auspices of the family media conglomerate. Not that the writers don't get all excited about their critique - on the contrary, they depict the juvenile tennis circuit as such an unremitting cesspool of greed, graft, coke fiends, and outright child abuse that it's a wonder the morality squad doesn't have the entire league in the wagon by the second act. The climactic tennis match is beset with a desperate cascade of thefts, arrests and heart attacks, but nobody seems to have figured out how to shoot a damned tennis game - there's so much half-baked 'montage' that you barely see the ball hit the court. Jessica Walter's chain-smoking, hemorrhoidal bitch of a tennis mom is clearly meant to make the showgirl look good by comparison, but with her predilection for pursuing unrestrained free love in the room she shares with her 13-year-old, Anton doesn't come off much better - "Why do I have to be so stupid?" indeed.

Sincerely, Violet

2010-10-07T15:18:00.001-07:00

(Mort Ransen, 1987)
It's remarkable how just a little bit of judiciously applied intelligence can enliven, if not quite redeem, the tiresome soap cliches of Julian Roffman's "Shades of Love" franchise. As usual, this one has a harried career woman (Patricia Phillips) falling for some blow-dried guy even more affluent than she is (Simon MacCorkindale). The wrinkle this time is that, in pursuit of documents for her research project, Phillips first breaks into the MacCorkindale residence in the middle of the night, then poses as a street-smart mental patient for his benefit. Ransen plays the break-in for amiable farce, the double-identity plot for Freudian musings re the truth of social performance, and both turn out to be exactly the right decisions, embracing and heightening the unreality of the scenario while hitting actual emotional resonances that carry you through the predictable romantic narrative that ensues. Ransen's atypical outbursts of humour - check out the interactions with the secretary, or the eavesdropping-dude-in-the-cafeteria routine - give the project such a lift that you don't even mind the remarkably dubious counsel of Phillips' psychotherapist buddy. And when the big musical numbers kick in, he focuses in on the faces of his subjects instead of collapsing into the usual vaseline-smeared montage - a small mercy, maybe, but a telling and generous one.

Siege

2010-10-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

(Paul Donovan/Maura O'Connell, 1983)
While the (honest!) Fuller-style limited action of this remarkably terse film leaves plenty of room for Donovan's liberal conscience, it imposes so much rigor and excises so much bullshit that you can't imagine it sprung from the same mind that tried to make us watch "Norman's Awesome Experience". Which makes me think that maybe O'Connell is the brains of the operation, especially since she also produced Donovan's other tolerable film, "Def-Con 4". After escaping a harrowing massacre in a Halifax gay bar, some guy teams up with an apartment full of slackers and misfits he's never met before to engage in a protracted and ingenious showdown with the hateful thugs. And that's all, folks: the movie never once breaks its thrillingly obsessive focus on the eccentric landscape and arsenal of the warehouse-district battlefield. The warriors' personalities, rendered in exquisite shorthand, are varied and vivid - resourceful or useless, sympathetic or remote, with complex variations on both sides of the war. Without any cosmetic separation between lead and support characters, you never know who's going to get offed next, especially since each side's weapons are jerry-rigged and prone to failure. It all adds up to a great deal of calculated, nerve-wracking excitement, and any concern that the police-strike context isn't as morally neutral as the filmmakers think it is is blown away by the final shot, which proves with quiet finality just how smart this team is.

Shoot

2010-10-07T14:01:00.001-07:00

(Harvey Hart, 1976)
As with his previous commentaries on buggery and religion, Hart's take on the NRA is well-nigh useless as documentary - instead, he's once again made some kind of weird horror movie, one that dares to push back against the collective psyche instead of pandering to it. After all, the public was hardly clamoring for a film that identified sport hunting with militarism with tribalism with fascism, and yet here it is, centered tellingly on Cliff Robertson's wealthy bastard of a furniture salesman instead of some hapless redneck. Glowering and heartless, Robertson has enough status to rally the troops for his nonsensical mission of supremacy, recruiting everyone from his black security guard to some loudmouth kid to his veteran buddies, including Ernest Borgnine as the alarmingly impotent and conflicted voice of conscience. Hart paints a picture of a 'community' far too bleak and repressed to reward the loyalty and unity it demands, a community wholly dedicated to single-minded paranoia and hatred - the kind of community, in short, that makes modern warfare possible. Hart's nightmare vision is so single-minded that he invests little in such niceties as credibility or even narrative - through the seemingly endless chatter, you can see the climax's wildly hyperbolic carnage coming a mile away. Of course, you could say the same thing about, for instance, Afghanistan. Which is what makes this movie's dragginess haunting and its excesses resonant.

The Silent Partner

2010-10-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

(Daryl Duke, 1978)
Since this is the lazy man's example of quality Canadian filmmaking in the tax shelter era, it's worth pointing out that Christopher Plummer doesn't quite cut it as a psychotic criminal. His steely glare keeps breaking to reveal the cultured softness underneath, and where his brutalization of women is completely off the handle, he keeps letting Elliott Gould off the hook. If these contradictions are intended as commentary then they don't quite work, and the resulting confusion raises some dangerous credibility issues in what is otherwise an airtight cat-and-mouse contraption. Curtis Hanson's script is so clever and compelling, so full of memorable detail, it leaves all comparable rom-com action films in the dust, and if Daryl Duke doesn't keep Plummer in full control, maybe it's because he was busy reining in Gould, who gives one of his best, most focused, least Gouldish performances. There are unresolved tensions between the scenario's brutal cynicism and the shaggy-dog tendencies of the production, but the newly built Eaton's Centre makes a great location, Duke makes the most of his wonderful ensemble cast, and Oscar Peterson's orchestral discords play brilliantly off the Christmas carols that set the ironic scene.

Silence of the North

2010-10-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

(Allan Winton King, 1981)
It would seem counterproductive for this script to advance the thesis that happy times have more staying power than tough ones, because the narrative itself barely glances at the fond memories en route to the next heartbreak, hardship, or imperilment by wild animal. Of course, the sentiment is also exactly the sort of homespun chestnut you'd expect from this kind of True Life Story; Olive Fredrickson's tale of Northern frontier life is indeed full of drama and adventure, but the telling of it is so steeped in ancient melodramatic cliche that I kept flashing back to "The Fatal Glass of Beer". Granted, this is quite accomplished hokum. King is smart enough to keep a lid on the histrionics until they're really needed, he gets charming performances from Ellen Burstyn, Tom Skerritt, and Gordon Pinsent in a rare romantic lead, and Richard Leiterman's photography half-redeems the excessive lingering over lakes and trees - in fact the extended meditation on the river ice breaking up is the most inspired part of the movie. The rest of the time, though, the director is only a body doing a job, not quite betraying his intelligence but never really putting it to work either - no real humour, no felt horror, just one big demonstration of resilience.

See You Monday!

2010-10-07T05:40:00.000-07:00

(Maurice Dugowson, 1979)
Certainly more honest and engaging than your average soap opera, in part because it argues for female bonding over romantic escapism, in part because the females in question are Carole Laure and Miou-Miou, who are appealing and sympathetic as well as drop dead gorgeous. It's a pleasure to watch them pal around as they struggle with their exceedingly first-world problems, especially because the French co-production details their dilemmas with some cinematic sense and wit. Like any soap opera, though, this movie absolutely clobbers its central dramatic crisis, as Miou-Miou traipses off to domestic boredom with David Birney's preoccupied clod of a Tampa doctor, while Laure gets something going with Claude Brasseur, a shifty travelling salesman in the ugly-older-guy tradition of French love interests. Anybody in the audience can see through these bozos from the minute they show up, and it discredits the women in this movie that they can't do the same, dallying interminably in their respective kept woman/nervous breakdown dilemmas. Imagine how much more credible and rewarding it would have been to just watch these two women keep on hanging around, trying and failing, getting on with their lives, instead of laying on the hard-sell melodrama. It might even have transcended soap opera.

Second Wind

2010-09-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

(Don Shebib, 1976)
I'd swear this was an answer film to "Rocky" except the damn thing came out six months earlier! It certainly does have its comparative uses, though, presenting the insatiable drive to win as a neurotic diversion rather than a panacea. James Naughton is not particularly likeable in the lead role, and that's the idea: he lets his midlife crisis distract himself from his work as a stock broker (which is understandable) and his marriage to Lindsay Wagner (which is pathological). But the ever-generous Shebib neither mocks his ambitions nor punishes him unduly for his self-absorption; he just denies the ordeal the mythic redemptive powers that such narratives (including his own "Running Brave") assumed in the shadow of Stallone. Admittedly, the training narrative draws Shebib away from his strength, which is to be found in the modestly eccentric interactions with the teeming support cast - who else would have deployed rejected hottie Tedde Moore in such a kind and unexpected way? The movie would be very close to the precarious balance it strives for, if only it weren't stampeded by the clownish triumphalism of Hagood Hardy's awesomely obnoxious score.

Seasons In the Sun

2010-09-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

(Ain Sodoor, 1979)
Looks as though one-hit-wonder Jacks, not noticing that the pop world had already forgotten about him entirely, decided that his belated star vehicle should be a personal statement about his deep desire to quit the rat race and go fishing. Only someone at Jacks Inc. must have let slip that this would not make a very compelling movie. So for drama the filmmakers lead off with their man falling into a sudden, hallucinatory coma on his way to the Gardens stage. Then, once our hero escapes from a protracted NYC meander and returns to his solitary reverie, they throw in a grizzled sailor who's really a Commie spy; a burly loudmouth who somehow fails to beat Jacks up; and an air-dropped love interest who is also a spy. All of these disjoint personae are beset by incomprehensible confusions or reversals of intent, and all are sprinkled in lightly and incongruously on top of absolutely endless footage of Jacks drinking tea, gutting fish, looking at trees, getting mildly dizzy in his toilet, and tumbling into unexplained piles of skulls. The effect is of a (barely) feature-length delirious episode, as though dude never really awoke from his coma after all. In fact, maybe I dreamed the whole thing.

The Accident

2010-09-30T10:04:00.000-07:00

(Donald Brittain, 1983)
Brittain's third feature narrative after a lifetime of documentary shows an astonishingly steady hand. The aftermath of a collapsing hockey arena affords a series of long and painful looks at the workings of personal trauma among local families, and Brittain shows great insight and compassion as he steadily unpacks the varieties of repression and introversion that ensue. As a detailed, disturbingly familiar snapshot of learned emotional failure in middle-class Ontario, this is given great impact by the precise, controlled acting, the expressively simple staging, even the uncommonly apt musical score. And the terrible failures that the trauma precipitates are not without a certain grim humour even as Brittain evokes with aching clarity how deep and culturally ingrained these failures are. So it's doubly depressing that the ending is so neat, so false, so made for TV - not only does every single character come to their senses and resume their role as productive members of society, they all do so simultaneously. It is an unholy copout that turns every searing truth the movie has told into a lie, and as an admission of defeat they wrap things up with an absurd where-are-they-now newscast that literalizes the film's painful retreat from reality.

Search and Destroy

2010-09-29T22:52:00.001-07:00

(William Fruet, 1979)
For once, what's wrong ideologically is precisely what's wrong cinematically: Jong Soo Park's vengeful Vietnamese guy isn't a character, he's an idea. Screenwriter Dan Enright (yeah, the game show magnate, who also co-produces with partner in crime Jack Barry) tries to complicate things by making "Assassin" a collaborator/politician instead of a soldier; there are fleeting parallels between his inhumane conduct and that of the American GIs, and in a lonely nod at characterization Park is revealed to be some kind of Christian. But Fruet's otherwise evident facility with actors is wasted on this stoic killing machine, and the vitriol of lead cop George Kennedy leaves no doubt that the man is symbolic of the country and the conflict is symbolic of the war: the extended confrontation between Park and vet Perry King is explicitly designed to be cathartic, not problematizing. Not that the film doesn't hold your attention; there's thrills and fascination to be had with the restaging of the war around the familiar terrain of Niagara Falls, and the subtext of military traumas that can't be shaken off does resonate in its typically insufficient way. But with two of the four targets offed by the end of the opening credits, there's not quite enough going on, and plausibility issues keep intruding on the action. The final battle in the jungle-like park is a great idea poorly realized, as what might have been an emotion-charged reckoning between two actual characters is reduced to an excessively vague exchange of bullets and blows.

Screwball Academy

2010-09-29T18:08:00.000-07:00

(Reuben Rose, 1986)
In between his triumphant direction of SCTV and his triumphant direction of Kids in the Hall, John Blanchard lent his talents to this wacky slapstick satire. So why is his name absent from the credits? Possibly because this movie is a disaster; or maybe I should say 'these movies' - each of the multifarious narratives seems to be aspiring to a different genre. Colleen Camp's feminist director does wisecracking screwball while her mincing Czech backers do gross dialect humour; Kenneth Welsh's hammy deadpan as the luddite fundamentalist gives way to the painfully gloppy romantic awakening of sheltered son Peter Spence. Meanwhile Janet Good plays herself and Damian Lee acts like he wishes he was an actor. Maybe Blanchard was trying to show off his unquestioned mastery of diverse comic styles - in which case somebody should have reminded him that movies don't work like that - but one suspects less calculated machinations were at play. And nobody benefits from the softcore drop-ins, the abrupt narrative truncations, or the 'inspirational' climax comprising a few dozen extras going for a walk. Some of the performers - Camp, Welsh, even love interest Wendy Bushell - might have seemed inspired in a competently made film; we'll never know.