It’s a Canada weekend. That’s represented in three new films getting the usual short play in theaters and, on Sunday, the Canadian Screen Awards on TV. They celebrate excellence though not necessarily big box office. The leader on the movie side this year is Mommy with 13 nominations including best picture. It didn’t survive to the short list at the Oscars but aced the Cesar awards in France where it was named best foreign movie. Just look at the competition it won over: Boyhood, 12 Years a Slave, Two Days, One Night, Ida, The Grand Budapest Hotel and Winter Sleep. Amazing.
Meanwhile, for hard-core movie buffs, the Cinematheque is screening another 24-hour movie marathon. For $40 you get films from 10 a.m. Saturday until 10 a.m. Sunday. Their website www.thecinematheque.ca/ has some info but the titles of the films are secret.
And another upcoming event: the Vancouver Women in Film Festival starts on Wed. this coming week and runs for four days. Margarita, with a Straw, a hit in Toronto will open it and All the Time In the World, the Most Popular Canadian Documentary at VIFF, will screen on the last day. There’s also a film about women in jazz and another about BC’s Highway of Tears. You can read about more at www.womeninfilm.ca/
These are new and now playing:
Focus: 3 stars
Sitting on the Edge of Marlene: 3 ½
Big News from Grand Rock: 2 ½
After the Ball: 2 ½
The Lazarus Effect: 2
FOCUS: Will Smith and Margot Robbie star and Glenn Ficarra and John Requa wrote and directed but I can’t help thinking that the real creative inspiration here is Apollo Robbins. He’s a slight-of-hand artist who has become famous on TV and a sensation on U-tube with amazing displays of how pickpockets work. He’s listed in the end credits as “con artist adviser/pickpocket design” and the film has extended sequences of that art. A slight bump on a guy in a Super Bowl crowd in New Orleans, a cohort’s quick grab of his wallet, a handover to a third and as we later learn credit card numbers and identity shipped off to Asia and big bills rung up. It’s a crackling speedy progression. Will heads a gang that’s got it working like a machine and taking in big payoffs.
“I can convince anyone of anything,” he says ultra-confidently. But as so often happens in the movies he gets distracted by a woman. Margot plays the neophyte he tutors in his trade, then beds, sends away and years later encounters again at a car race in Buenos Aires. So while the film is about con-men and, in one absorbing sequence about gambling addiction, it becomes a love story. The people are beautiful; the love scenes are not hot but flirty and the luxurious life of these thieves is enticing. But there are a few too many twists and double-crosses and the story gets unsteady. Until then, this is as slick as Hollywood entertainment gets. (Scotiabank, Dunbar and many suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
SITTING ON THE EDGE OF MARLENE: This is a gritty and engrossing film about a recurring problem: how a young woman can manage to shake off the influence of her mother and become herself. The method here is pretty extreme but then so is the mother. She drinks and pops pills, pulls scams on men she meets in bars and spends a lot of all-nighters out somewhere. She can’t pay the rent but claims to be doing the best she can. Sometimes playful with her 16-year-old daughter and prone to offering counsel like “We have to dress for success. We’re career girls now” she works at involving her in her petty crimes.
Actually she’s on a downward spiral and Quebec’s Suzanne Clément communicates the self-delusion and the alternating grim and feisty moods intensely. (She played alongside a different kind of mom in Mommy). Paloma Kwiatkowski is very good as the daughter whose confusion sends her to try a youth club cum church, fight a bully and ultimately to face up to mom. This is a deep and emotional exploration of both their characters. It’s filled out from a novel by Billie Livingston of Vancouver, filmed with very few misteps in Maple Ridge and Langley and well-directed by Ana Valine, who has won several awards for the work. She’ll do a Q&A after the Friday and Saturday screenings. (VanCity Theater) 3 ½ out of 5
BIG NEWS FROM GRAND ROCK: I think this film, as Canadian as you’d want it to be, would do better on TV. Its small-town charm and gentle but loony humor would do better there. As it is, it’s playing in only one theatre here, at the Esplanade in North Van. The TV audience would know the actors including Ennis Esmer (of CTV), Peter Keleghan, Kristin Booth and that veteran of many media, Gordon Pinsent. They’d more warmly embrace the slight story and get on to its serious side.
Ennis plays the enthusiastic editor at a small Ontario newspaper where not much happens; the reporters are short of ideas and the owner (Pinsent) is planning a shutdown. Ennis finds ideas at the video store (still exists in this community) and writes fake stories. Caddyshack leads to the headline: Golf Tournament Goes Awry. Another one is Babysitter, Kids Safe After Wild Night. The readers return as the yarns get more sensational. When one causes a scandal and attracts a big city reporter to come and investigate, Ennis has to tell bigger and bigger evasions to hide his trickery. Meanwhile, he’s been missing a real story just outside his door. An actual case of made up news inspired writer-director Daniel Perlmutter and with development help at Montreal’s Just For Laughs comedy festival he’s made a small but pleasant film. (Landmark Theatre North Van) 2 ½ out of 5
AFTER THE BALL: This Canadian comedy would be really good if only it weren’t so bland. The cast is strong, the story has potential and the setting –the Montreal world of fashion—is colorful. But there are opportunities missed. There’s a fairy tale parallel too omnipresent and the humor strives to be amiable rather than biting. Half-way through, the film suddenly turns into a Shakespeare knock off, as in his play, Twelfth Night.
Portia Doubleday is immensely engaging as the daughter of a women’s apparel manufacturer known for copying other people’s designs (an underdeveloped plot point). She can’t get a job in the industry in New York and has to come home and work for her dad, played dull by Sex and the City’s Chris Noth. She has to deal with glass doors so easy to bump into, a stepmother (played vibrant and mean by Lauren Holly) and two bumbling stepsisters aiming to sabotage her work. They succeed. She’s fired and returns disguised as a man, a hot shot designer with a blunt manner. She gets help from a gay friend (of course), the owners of a vintage clothing shop and a shoe designer (played by hunk Marc-André Grondin). Colin Mochrie arrives as a rival plotting to buy up the business. The story arc is familiar, including the glittery shoe dropped on the staircase. It’s a pleasant but thin work by director Sean Garrity, and producers Don Carmody, Canada’s most successful, Gabriella Martinelli, whose BC connections go way back to My American Cousin and Jane Silverstone-Segal, the CEO of Le Chåteau stores which supplied all the clothes. (International Village and Langley theatres) 2 ½ out of 5
THE LAZARUS EFFECT: Why are the movies continually afraid of science? Think of how many films show experiments that go profoundly wrong. It’s as if that’s all they can do. This film follows that arc. It starts with a credible scientific ambience, both in the characters’ talk and the lab they work in. Before long they’re rebuked for playing God and by the end, it’s all turned into a bloody horror film. It’s the first fiction directed by David Gelb, who last made the sublime documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
Also out of place are two actors, mumblecore veteran Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde as husband and wife medical researchers. They have a serum that can re-grow parts of the brain that’s in a coma. It works on a dog bringing him back from the dead although with side effects. Then, although thugs from big pharma took most of it away and never figure in the story again, it has to be pressed into service again because Olivia accidentally dies by electrocution. The test is done surreptitiously. There’s a fair amount of suspense, a bit of talk about ethics, life and death and then a straight descent into horror movie territory as Olivia comes back acting like a demon. To drive home the obvious, Mozart’s Queen of the Night is heard in the lab. Nonsensical stuff. (International Village and suburban theaters) 2 out of 5