I was prompted to see Videoheaven, a three-hour essay about video store culture, by the trailer preview event at Carbon Arc Cinema a couple weeks ago. From Alex Ross Perry, it’s narrated by Maya Hawke, and opens with a clip of her father, Ethan, in the early ’90s take on Hamlet, where he does the “to be or not to be,” monologue in a video store.
The film looks at the way video stores have been depicted in Hollywood, from a fringe film culture spot in the 1980s to a mainstream, corporatized space in the 1990s, and then, later on, down the road to irrelevance and extinction, looking at everything from clerks to adult film cubbies to the role of cinephilia. Hugely nostalgic, and undoubtably well-researched, it’s everything an aficionado of video stores could want and then some. One of my cinepanions suggested it could’ve easily been an hour shorter. I agree, but it still works at three.
Mile End Kicks is Toronto critic-turned-filmmaker Chandler Levack’s second feature, following the delightful I Like Movies. This is a more mature, funnier piece, drawing again from personal experience, though equally awkward as her first. Her avatar is Grace (Barbie Ferreira, terrific), a Toronto-based music writer in her early 20s who pulls up stakes and moves to Montreal for the summer, planning to use to the time to write a book about Alanis Morissette, learn how to speak French, climb the mountain, have sex, and fall in love.
Things don’t go well for Grace right off since she’s prone to making poor decisions, struggles with self-esteem, and is obsessed with talentless goombahs who play in rock bands. So it ever was, the Almost Famous inspiration is undeniable. I was concerned about this movie at first that it would celebrate the Montreal scene of the late oughties — the birthplace of a lot of overrated indie-rock bands who listened to too much Pavement, but Levack’s gentle humour and raw honesty about all of it, and Ferreira’s vanity free performance, carry the day. The summery Mile End neighbourhood is fine to see.
Having been surprised by how much I enjoyed Richard Linklater’s new film Blue Moon, I wasn’t sure his behind-the-scenes look at Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, Breathless, would be quite as pleasing time in the cinema, but Nouvelle Vague almost manages it.
Copying the look of Godard, the hand-held camera and the grainy black-and-white film, Linklater plays a charming host to the many characters in the wildly ambitious, more-than-a-little pretentious French New Wave of the early 1960s, bringing a solid cadre of lookalike French actors to play Godard, Truffaut, Belmondo, Chabrol, et al. Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg is strong — this picture might make a fun double-feature with Kristen Stewart’s take on the American icon, Seberg. Linklater remains the real star here with that astonishing matching of visual style, and somehow recreating Paris in the 1960s in the street scenes and fashions. The subject matter might be too niche for anyone but genuine cineasts, but it’s never dull.
The idea of character-driven indie filmmaker like Kelly Reichardt (Showing Up, Certain Women, First Cow) doing a caper movie seems a little perverse in the face of it. She managed a western with Meek’s Cutoff, but this is a whole other bag. Having seen The Mastermind, I can confirm, it is perverse. Reichardt undermines any sense of suspence — she refuses to show real violence, even a scene of an alarm clock thrown in anger happens off camera. No, it doesn’t really work. But this is a movie of two parts, and if it doesn’t launch feeling like a Reichardt, it eventually gets there.
It’s 1970 in small town New England, all brown and orange inside and out. Josh O’Connor is JB Mooney, an out-of-work architect and family man (Alana Haim plays his barely verbal wife) who, when we meet him, has already planned to lift four paintings from his local art museum with a little help from a couple of guys — it’s unclear if they’re friends or just local dudes he pays. This portion feels a little like one of the funnier Coen Brothers movies but on heavy opioids — a great, jazzy score helps lift it, but it’s never escapes seeming like it was made by someone who hates the kinds of movies she’s aping.
With Mooney barely able to manage taking care of his twin sons, how will he “mastermind” an art heist? It doesn’t help that O’Connor plays this guy as entirely personality free. We get hints of his character when we meet a few of his old friends, but we never get a sense of why he was driven to break the law, his desperation.
The second half, though at times even more plodding, seems more true to Reichardt’s storytelling — Mooney, now alone, wanders through dark rooms that feel right out of an Edward Hopper painting by way of 1970s American existential drama, Five Easy Pieces. It’s a portrait of loneliness and failure against a country coming apart over Vietnam, and it’s compelling stuff once it’s left genre tropes behind. Whatever privilege Mooney’s skin colour and his family’s money has afforded him, it’s all gone now.
