Two re-makes get the hype and attention this week but please look further to a very good Canadian film, a thriller with an accurate view of a mental illness and another that exposes a terror in Africa.
Here’s the list:
Starbuck: 4 stars
French Immersion: 2
Footloose: 3
Take Shelter: 4 1/2
Machine Gun Preacher: 3
The Thing: --
The Big Year: --
A Legend of Whitey: --
STARBUCK: This is a wonderful Canadian film. How rare is that? Not so rare in Quebec, where it comes from and where it was a huge hit this summer. Ken Scott, who directed it, wrote the equally outstanding The Seduction of Doctor Lewis a few years ago and is about to re-make it in English. In Starbuck he has a sweet, poignant and funny tale about a man nudged to mature when his past catches up to him.
Patrick Huard stars as a multi-faceted failure. He’s got the easiest job at work, through nepotism, and still messes up. He’s an embarrassment to his family and a deadbeat to the loan-sharks who hound him. His main ambition is to grow more marijuana. But years before he made money by donating at a sperm bank which he now learns resulted in over 500 children, 142 of whom want to get to know him. They’ve filed a class action suit to get his name. He can’t resist peaking at their profile sheets and one by one starts meeting some of them anonymously. As he gets to know them he softens up and sees them as family. Just in time, because his girlfriend (Julie le Breton) is pregnant and not convinced he can be serious. The film also evolves. The straight comedy becomes a moving drama with very little sappiness but a lot of warmth. (5th Avenue) 4 out of 5
FRENCH IMMERSION: This is a movie from Quebec that doesn’t work, although good on it for daring to joke about the French-English divide in this country. Too bad much of the humor is broad and over-excited because there are clever bits in there. Some won’t travel to English-Canada, a misunderstanding gag for instance that has an Anglo consoling a French couple on the death of their daughter Cegep in a bus accident. CEGEPs are community colleges and she had merely taken the bus there. Other gags, like Colm Feore appearing on TV as a Trudeau-like politician, will play differently here and there, although it sits undeveloped on either side.
In this story four Anglos and an American head to a language school in a small Quebec town to learn French. The actors are mostly familiar TV faces, including Vancouver’s Fred Ewanuick as an Albertan, Gavin Crawford as an ambitious politician and Olunike Adeliyi as an airline flight attendant. They all need to be bilingual, although why in Red Deer, one of the gags asks. Robert Charlebois, the legendary singer, plays a wily senator. His big hit Lindberg is sung around a campfire and described as Quebec’s national anthem. There’s also a Punjabi family running a restaurant. That allows for the movie to close out with a Bollywood dance number which is not only out of place but indicates how haphazardly the elements have been tossed together. Kevin Tierney, making his directing debut, produced the equally knockabout comedy Bon Cop, Bad Cop, Canada’s all-time box-office champ. (International Village) 2 out of 5
FOOTLOOSE: The story is much the same – angry teen fights a local by-law to allow the kids to once again dance and cut loose. A car-truck accident three years earlier killed five and resulted in curfews and a ban on both loud music and that perilous “public dancing”. The energy in this remake is just as high and so is the urgency of the democratic statement about “my right to dance when I want, where I want and how I want.”
So, the film is enjoyable enough. It’s just nothing special and doesn’t have a lot to justify a new version. Kenny Wormald is the new Ren McCormack. Who? He’s a dancer familiar to MTV viewers and from a few other movies. He was born the same year the original Footloose came out and is too mild in this new one for the troubled kid the script makes him out to be. Julianne Hough is the scene stealer here, a Jennifer Aniston look-alike who exudes small-town nice girl vibes and then does more bumping and grinding and even a bit of pole dancing than you might expect from a preacher’s daughter. Director Craig Brewer has amped up the sexy scenes. He’s also put in what he calls “Southern grit” which proves to be some exuberant line dancing in one of the best sequences and a strong alt country flavor in the songs: eight new ones and four re-recorded for the film. Let’s Hear it For the Boy is now heard through a Barbie player as four little girls dance like they’re in a music video. (Scotiabank, Dunbar, Oakridge and many suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
TAKE SHELTER: I can’t remember that I’ve ever seen a better representation of schizophrenia in the movies. Michael Shannon gives an amazing performance as a regular family man with a good job who starts having dreams about rain storms and attacks by swarms of birds. He gradually sinks deeper into paranoia and also sees these visions while he’s awake. They become apocalyptic and in his periods of clear-thinking he becomes obsessed with building a shelter in his backyard. “There is a storm coming like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he yells.
His daughter is scared by his outbursts. He breaks down weeping after one particularly bad one. His wife (Jessica Chastain) is supportive when it’s only a vague feeling that “something’s not right” and later tries to get him to a psychiatrist. The film grabs you from the beginning to show his decline but eases up often enough so that it doesn’t become an ordeal. That’s probably true to the disorder too; it seems to come in waves. Here the mood is eerie most of the time and harrowing at the peaks. The only feeling I have that something is not right is about the ending. It seems to back off from the line of logic it was following. Still, it’s a thrilling movie with strong images and superb acting. (5th Avenue) 4 ½ out of 5.
MACHINE GUN PREACHER: If it weren’t a true story, we’d call it contrived. Imagine, a Pennsylvania tough-guy gets out of prison to find his wife has found Jesus, or as she says, Jesus found her. He tells her to go back to work as a stripper. She says no. He runs off to a biker bar where he shoots up heroin and wakes in the morning to his daughter’s eyes silently asking why. Before you know it he’s in church, finds religion himself and takes on a personal mission: to help rescue child soldiers in Africa. He does it by providing them shelter in an orphanage he built and often by battling the men who try to kidnap boys for their armies.
Gerard Butler plays the real-life crusader Sam Childers with a teeth-clenching intensity and a wandering accent. He’s not perfectly credible but the scenes the movie puts him into are. There are night time raids on innocent villagers by the Lord’s Resistance Army, gun battles with boys who look about 12 and harrowing stories of the boys’ recruitment and training in the army. The film makes a valuable contribution by revealing these horrors. That trumps the odd problem in how the film is constructed. As the real Childers says in a clip attached to the end credits, does it really matter how it’s done?. (International Village) 3 out of 5
And, also now playing: three that I haven’t seen:
THE THING: This being from another world first appeared in the Arctic in 1951, in a film some think the great Howard Hawks directed. John Carpenter remade it in 1982 but set it down under in the Antarctic. It’s still there in this new version which is said to be a prequel. At the very least, that tells you the thing won’t be killed at the end. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a graduate student who joins a Norwegian scientific team that finds an alien space ship and an apparently dead “thing”. They conduct an experiment. It comes back to life. They’re under attack. An unnecessary re-make/prequel, I’m told by a friend who’s seen it. (Scotiabank and suburban theatres)
THE BIG YEAR: It’s hard to tell from the trailers but this is a comedy about bird watching. It was filmed around BC and parts of the Yukon, which means lots of photogenic scenery, and it stars Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin. They’re competing in a year-long race to spot the most bird species around North America. Power birding can get extremely intense and these are three edgy comedians. So what happened? A friend who got to a press screening tells me this a very bland film. (International Village and many suburban theatres)
A LEGEND OF WHITEY: David Lawrence and Paul Spence are famous within certain circles as the two stoners in the FUBAR movies. Now, they want us to see them as half brothers on the run from racists, homophobes and gossips in Alberta’s pioneer days.
They are also trying to shepherd a white spirit buffalo which they believe is actually a beautiful woman under a spell. Improvised comedy becomes a campy western with a dim view of Alberta’s past. The film received a mixed reception at a Calgary festival and the two stars and creators will be at the first show of its Vancouver run (Saturday, Granville Theatre) to explain, defend and answer questions.
NOTE: The images are movie still supplied by the studios and are therefore the exclusive property of their copyright owners.