Down the Road Again

(Don Shebib, 2011)
Shebib's belated "Goin' Down the Road" sequel is heartfelt and honest, but that doesn't mean it's any good; its elegiac tale of mortality is tragically bereft of craft. The first half of the film is a wistful epitaph for the long-gone Paul Bradley, and there's no there there; the flashbacks and exhumations from the original fail to find any semblance of form or focus. The East Coast sequence cedes some ground to original characters and present situations, but only glimmers of poignancy survive the overwhelming air of contrivance. The skeletal narrative taxes credibility in outline and pulverizes it in execution, with way too many unmotivated leaps in character development. None of Shebib's artistic strengths shine through; his dialogue, once so full of wit and surprise, is leaden and literal, and the direction shows no trace of the spontaneity and open space that used to breathe life into his languid intimacy. Kathleen Robertson's Betty-Jo is the invention of a man who can't recall the distinction between 40 and 25, and the sympathy and charm of the cast as a whole is left to wither and die.

Marie Ann

(Martin Walters, 1978)
Hard to believe the producer (Fil Fraser) who brought us the adorable Why Shoot the Teacher? proceeded directly to this dire thing, the story of the Canadian west's first white woman. But what kind of "story" is this? The entire movie feels like an inciting incident, forsaking all revealing details of the pioneer woman's life for an exceedingly halfhearted love triangle plot. Andree Pelletier is required to do so much standing around looking pretty that whenever the occasion arises to express an emotion she pounces on it like raw meat; meanwhile Tantoo Cardinal lurks and broods, broods and lurks. The project looks like it was dreamed up by local historians who had never seen a movie; the production design may be 'authentic', but neither the sets nor the characterizations feel lived-in. The flat cinematography, amateurish lighting, erratic location sound, and naggingly incongruous harpsichord soundtrack are all hallmarks of a provincial cinema that can barely hold its oar. Scholastic-style narration, carelessly slapped on to the head and tail, sheepishly explains why anyone should care.

Shivers

(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

(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

(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

(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

(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.