With the unusual coincidence that three festival features are arriving in cinemas on the same weekend, here are my (slightly or somewhat) updated AIFF and TIFF reviews.
Mile End Kicks | Written and Directed by Chandler Levack | 112 min | ▲▲▲
Mile End Kicks is Toronto critic-turned-filmmaker Chandler Levack’s second feature, following the delightful I Like Movies. This is a more mature, even funnier piece, drawing again from personal experience and channelling a spirit as awkward as the first time. Her avatar this time is Grace (Barbie Ferreira, terrific), a Toronto-based music writer in her early 20s in 2011 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. Reasonable ambitions, but naturally not everything goes to plan.
Right off we see Grace is prone to making poor decisions, terminal embarrassment, struggles with self-esteem, and is obsessed with talentless goombahs who play in rock bands — the dude musicians she comes across are either clueless or wildly self-involved. So it ever was, the Almost Famous inspiration is undeniable. Having been reading about Lena Dunham’s memoir coming out this week, I can’t help but think how Levack’s film, set in the era where Girls was such a phenomenon, also owes a debt to that show. Grace is someone to cheer for, but also to watching while wincing.
I confess, I have little nostalgia for the Montreal music scene from that period — 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. Also, as those of us in the Maritimes remain stuck in the brutal, grey, and wet spring, the summery Montreal locations are an oasis of elegant spiral staircases and glorious sunshine.
Little Lorraine | Directed by Andy Hines | Written by Hines and Adam Baldwin | 116 min | ▲▲1/2
The idea of turning a song into a feature film is long overdue. I can think of a dozen candidates for future features, from artists like Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, and Rush. If this Cape Breton picture spawns more of this kind of thing, that will be a hell of a legacy. It is, indeed, inspired by Adam Baldwin’s “Lighthouse In Little Lorraine,” and Baldwin is credited as co-screenwriter with first-time feature director Andy Hines, scion of photographer Sherman Hines and well-regarded music video director in his own right.
If you know the song you know the story bullet points: Cape Breton 1986, Jimmy (Stephen Amell, stony) and his buddies (Joshua Close and Steve Lund) are out-of-work coal miners when family black sheep, Uncle Huey (Stephen McHattie) comes back to town with an offer of a job — working on a lobster boat. That turns out pretty well for Jimmy and his family at first, though when it comes clear that Huey’s actually part of a cocaine smuggling operation, Jimmy keeps that secret from his wife, Emma (Auden Thornton), and the guilt of a life of crime takes a toll on them all.
The accents sound pretty authentic, and it’s been awhile — maybe since the era of New Waterford Girl and Margaret’s Museum — that a picture with a genuine budget has told a homegrown Cape Breton story. There’s something none-more-Nova Scotian that the heart of this crime drama hangs on a few good Cape Breton boys being too nice to make decent drug smugglers, but the folksy home-life domesticity of kids birthdays and kitchen parties bumps awkwardly against the crime thriller elements until the latter overwhelms the former.
Maybe the biggest takeaway of Little Lorraine is it offers McHattie another high point in a sprawling career full of them — his Huey is absolutely terrifying and provides a welcome antagonist to drive the film’s tension.
The Christophers | Directed by Steven Soderbergh | Written by Ed Solomon | ▲▲▲1/2
It’s good to see Soderbergh telling another story in London following his excellent Black Bag, though otherwise this one couldn’t be more different.
A once-famed British painter, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), lives in a shambling house in Fitzrovia overstuffed with decades of his work. His two adult children (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) want to get their hands on an incomplete third series of his most famous paintings, portraits of a former lover. They hire a forger, Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), to substitute copies and steal the originals. It turns out the forger might have her own reasons to want a bit of payback on this wildly egotistical but charmingly hilarious painter.
Soderbergh, working as his own cinematographer and editor, as usual, defers to handheld camera in this picture, some of which is a little off-putting in the jerky-cam stakes, but a movie like this sinks or swims on the strength of its script and performances. Coel and especially McKellen really shine, and they bring some stellar chemistry. What the movie’s really about is the value of creativity in our capitalist society, what so-called genius artists resort to in order to get paid, and their sometimes troubled relationship to their own work. For a Soderbergh it’s surprisingly emotional, though less surprisingly unpredictable. Good stuff all around.
