January 27, 2012. Airplanes and Wheelchairs. Films Reviewed: Red Tails, Moon Point PLUS Oscar nominations
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies, for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, genre and mainstream movies, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
They announced the Oscar nominees this week, some expected and others not so. I’ll be talking more about the nominations closer to the awards ceremony. They nominated some enjoyable movies – like The Help, War Horse, some good but not special ones like the Descendents, some good but flawed movies like the Tree of Life, and some mediocre ones like The Artist. And then there are the shockers. They nominated one of the worst movies of the year for best picture — Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; one of the worst acting performances — Rooney Mara for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; and Nick Nolte’s overwrought “Drunk Dad” in the mixed martial arts flick The Warrior.
I think Hugo is a good movie, but isn’t it sad that Scorsese could win for his so-so movies like this or The Departed but not for Taxi Driver, Goodfellas or King of Comedy? Ok, just wanted to let off a bit of steam, as I plod along my way…
This week I’m looking at two movies in motion. One’s an American film about soldiers who want to fly in the air, and a Canadian one about friends who want to roll up a hill.
Red Tails (Based on a true story)
Dir: Anthony Hemingway
It’s nearing the end of WWII. The Americans have taken Italy and are pushing the Germans northward across Europe. And at one of the Italian bases is a team of ace flyers who have yet to see battle. Why? Because they’re all African Americans from a special Air Force project in Tuskegee, Alabama. And in the 1940’s America was still a segregated country, with the “colour bar” strictly enforced. Black officers aren’t even allowed to drink in the officers’ club. The want to kill some Germans. Instead they’re 
stuck puttering around in glued together old junk-heaps, aiming their guns at covered jeeps and enemy trains.
Their officers, meanwhile, are in DC, trying to give them a chance to do some real fighting as they train in northern Italy. The whites in the military characterize this group of bright-eyed University-educated, ambitious, would-be-heroes as lazy and incompetent.
But they are actually champ flyers and fighters, especially Lightning (David Oyelowo) the best of them all. He swoops and spins, ducks, turns and flies upside down They all have nicknames, like “Easy” (Nate Parker) the drinker, or “Junior” (Elijah Kelley) the kid – with their names and logos painted on the sides of their planes. But they all want “kills” o their planes, too.
One day on a flight, Lightning sees a beautiful woman, Sofia (Daniela Ruah) looking out her window as he flies overhead – they catch each others’ eyes, and it’s love at first sight. (But will it be happily ever after?)
Finally the men are given new planes to fly, and they paint the tails bright red to make it clear who they are. Will they win their battles? Will Lightning shoot down his personal enemy a Red Baron Nazi flyer they call Pretty boy for his scarred face? And will they get to go with the other planes to drop bombs on Berlin?
What can I say about this movie?
It has a lot going for it. I liked the acting – an all-around good cast (although the scenes in Washington, with Terrence Howard pleading his soldiers’ case, were painfully wooden). David Oyelowo, especially, owns the screen.. And I have to say I enjoy the spectacular plane fights up in the air – it felt like a cool video game. And it’s a good idea to tell little-known history, to give kids role models, and to celebrate forgotten accomplishments by African Americans.
The problem is in the movie’s tone. Seriously — is it possible to show such a gung-ho, “war is great” type of movie in this day and age with a straight face? Even a hint of disgust for the excesses of war would have made this more understandable for contemporary audiences. Instead it ends up feeling more like a 1940’s recruitment ad then a modern-day movie.
Moon Point
Dir: Sean Cisterna
Darryl (Nick McKinley) is a slacker, a loser, and a compulsive liar who lives at home and is picked on by his snobby cousin Lars. He does little aside from hanging out with his good friend Femur (Kyle Mac), a disabled orphan who lives with his grandma. But when his cousin sarcastically asks if Darryl will be bringing a date to Lars’s upcoming wedding, he vows he’ll be bringing a movie star. You see, he had a crush on Sarah Cherry when he was a kid, and now she’s back shooting a movie.
Things have got to change. So Darryl convinces Femur to drive him up north to Moon 
Point, a town where where the movie’s being shot. By drive, he’s referring to Femur’s motorized scooter he uses when not in a wheelchair. So Darryl climbs into the little metal cart pulled by the scooter and begin their extremely slow trip to the North. On the way they meet a young woman, Kristin (Paula Brancati) who hitches a ride after her car broke down.
Will Darryl ever find his Hollywood crush? Will Kristin find her true love? And will Femur tackle his personal crisis? And can they all get to Moon Point and back in time for a wedding… at 5 miles an hour?
Moon Point is a very low-budget, locally-made Canadian comedy. It’s cute and fairly original with likeable characters. It’s a comedy, but some of the jokes fall as flat as a pancake. The humour comes less from the one-liners than from the unusual and uncomfortable situations characters find themselves in. Like sitting in on an A.A. meeting after catching a lift from a drunk driver (played by Art Hindle… dressed in a banana suit!) Or an impromptu karaoke contest in a highway roadhouse. The tone swings back and forth, from hokey to charming — but I ended up liking it.
Moon Point reminds me of Bruce MacDonald’s earliest movies, like Roadkill, only not rock and roll… calmer, gentler.
Red Tails is playing now, and Moon Point opens in Toronto next week – check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site CulturalMining.com.
January 19, 2012. Unromantic Romances. Movies Reviewed: The Iron Lady, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Not Since You. PLUS Sing-a-long Grease
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies, for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, genre and mainstream movies, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Winter is here now — that probably explains the bitter cold and the snow blowing into our faces. So to warm the cockles of your hearts, how about a bit of romance? For a double-dose of romantic pop and cinematic nostalgia, put on your bobby socks or grease back your hair and come sing at a special Sing-Along version of the movie musical Grease 
(playing Monday night at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto).
Yes, this week, a whole month before Valentine’s Day, I’m talking about three romances – all of a distinctly unromantic sort – and a documentary. One’s about an elderly woman (who was once a Prime Minister) remembering her husband ; another about a hard-boiled computer hacker and her friend, an investigative journalist; and one about a reunion of a group of college friends at a wedding.
The Iron Lady
Dir: Phyllida Lloyd
Margaret (Meryl Streep) a doddering old lady with Alzheimer’s is haunted by memories of her late husband Denis (Jim Broadbent). She hopes that by clearing away his personal items from her home she can clear away her confusing memories and halucinations. But as she tidies up, the past comes back to her in a powerful way: life as a grocer’s daughter in the Blitz, as a rising star in the Conservative Party, and later as the radically right-wing British Prime Minister in the 1980’s. Margaret, of course, is Margaret Thatcher, the only Prime Minister with an “-ism” all her own.
Thatcherism led to riots; a sell-off of the nation’s utilities to shady investors; huge cuts in public services; privatization of public housing; violent strike-breaking and anti-union legislation; a decimation of the British welfare state; and an entire country’s economic future left to the self-correcting winds of a free market. Her legacy continues to plague the UK today.
But this movie is more about her home life: The big events all happens somewhere outside her hermetically-sealed plastic bubble. The people you catch occasional glimpses of are all angry shouters and screamers, rioters and Irish terrorists who are just messing everything up.
Incredibly, Thatcher herself is portrayed as an honest, honourable woman who stays true to her ideals without even the slightest self-interest or cynicism. While she is shown as petty, vindictive, and self-centred, her speeches in Parliament differ not at all from her conversations at home.
Maybe that’s how she saw herself, but the movie could have taken a tiny step back and shown something outside her own narrow view of the world. Instead, this movie was trapped in a claustrophobic space where only Thatcher’s inner thoughts and memories of her relationship with her husband come through clearly.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Dir: David Fincher
.. is a catastrophic remake of last year’s Swedish film. Here’s part of what I wrote last year about the original version:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a mystery thriller about Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist, and Lisbeth Salander, a young, mysterious hacker, and their interactions with the Vanger group, a very shady family of billionaires.
Blomkvist loses his job at a leftist magazine and faces a prison term after writing an expose on a corrupt billionaire. His source proved to have been a set-up. So he is forced to take a well-paying job as a sort of a researcher / detective for a different, billionaire, who’s trying to find out what happened to his niece Harriet, who was kidnapped or killed – the body was never found – decades before. The Vanger family is sleazy to the Nth degree. They live out in the woods in sinister, Nordic hunting lodges, equipped with a skeleton in every closet.
But Blomkvist is gradually reveals the hidden past, with the help of an anonymous hacker. This helper, Lisbeth Salander, is a fantastic cross between Steve McQueen and Tank Girl. She’s tuff, she’s rough, she’s stone cold. She’s a punk, she’s a loner, she’s an ex-con, she’s a computer genius. She’s also the girl of the title, with the dragon tattoo. She’s initially hired by the Vangers to spy on and write a report on Blomkvist, to make sure he can be trusted. They eventually meet up and form a sort of alliance, to try to find out what happened to the missing girl, and solve the ever-thickening mystery.
So what has changed? Well, the left-wing magazine collective is changed to an ordinary 
newsmagazine just trying to survive media downturns. The Vangers’ Nazi and Christian fundamentalist twists are swept under an invisible rug. One crucial, horrendous scene, is changed from a chilling, plain documentation to a grotesquely exploitative and titillating version. But worst of all, the rough-and-tough invincible, impermeable Lisbeth Salander is turned into a blubbering, vulnerable little girl who is infatuated with her “Daddy” (Blomkvist)!
It’s such a terrible misfire of the essential dynamics of their relationship. Daniel Craig is OK as Blomkvist, but Rooney Mara is awful as the Girl with Dragon Tattoo, and the excitement and suspense of the original is turned into a boring, detective procedural.
Not Since You
Dir: Jeff Stephenson
A group of college friends (most of whom haven’t seen each other for a decade) are all together again for a wedding in Georgia. Now there are four guys and three women with unfinished business – lots of past relationships and friendships left hanging. (The fourth woman is the unseen bride) Sam (Desmond Harrington), the tall, handsome loner still holds a torch for pretty, blonde Amy (Kathleen Robertson). He traveled in Europe and recorded his feelings in a leather notebook. But Amy’s married now, to some frat-boy (Christian Kane). Meanwhile, former best friends and drinking buddies business student Howard and his side-kick Billie are at odds because Billie is dating Howard’s old girlfriend, pretty blonde Victoria. Pushy Howard (Jon Abrahams) wants to get the Kentucky Colonel moonshine gazillionaire (who’s paying for the wedding) to invest in his biofuel venture. He also feels like he was screwed by his best friend who stole his ex-girlfriend. And Fudge feels alone and insecure without his buddies, while still-a-virgin Doogie feels like a third wheel around her prettier friends.
So there they all are in Athens Georgia, dressed to the T’s in their wedding gear, trying to settle their differences. Will Doogie and Fudge overcome their sexual inhibitions? Does Amy still have feelings for brooding Sam? (Sam sure still likes Amy!) And will Billie and Howard ever get back their old friendship or will their rivalry lead to no good?
This movie is all about old relationships – where they stand, what happened, and where will they go from here. The cast is uniformly very good looking – in a daytime soap-opera kind of way – but we learn little about them other than who they once slept with (all off-screen) and who they love. For the women, love means choosing between two men wooing them. For the men it’s pining or brooding or fighting to get their girls back. They’re exactly like real people; they’re just not very interesting people. Not Since You isn’t a rom-com… it’ a rom-dram.
The Iron Lady and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are now playing, Not Since You opens today, and and an excellent documentary, Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness, Directed by Joseph Doron, opens in Toronto next week – check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site CulturalMining.com.
January 13, 2012. Daniel Garber Interviews Noemi Weis Producer of Doc “Teaching the Life of Music”
A new documentary, “Teaching the Life of Music”, produced by Canadian filmmaker Noemi Weis, explains the international cultural phenomenon known as El Sistema (the system). It’s a social program, originally from Venezuela, that uses music to advance the lives of marginalized and underprivileged youth. Noemi talks about El Sistema and her documentary in this interview.
Teaching The Life of Music
A Film by David New
Narrated by Cory Monteith
Produced by Noemi Weis
World Broadcast Premiere on OMNI Television
OMNI English January 22, 2012 | 9:00PM EST
OMNI Spanish January 29, 2012 | 8:00PM EST
January 12, 2012. Genre Mash-ups. Movies Reviewed: Contraband, The Devil Inside, Renzo Martens’ Episode 1
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies, for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, genre and mainstream movies, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
Did you ever notice there haven’t been any truly new fashions, or political movements, or musical genres in a long time? In the past, there seemed to be huge reversals and brand new genres popping up all the time; while now, it just seems like more and more frequent revivals of past trends, slightly repackaged. So what’s new? What’s different? Well, things are changing and do seem different, despite it being difficult to pinpoint exactly what these new things are called. But one definite change is the profusion of new mash-ups and recombinations of what we’ve already seen. So this week I’m looking at some interesting (though imperfect) movies – a chiller, a thriller, and a piece of conceptual art – that all seem to be mash-ups of mixes of genres and forms.
Contraband
Dir: Baltasar Kormákur
In Contraband, Mark Wahlberg is replaying his perpetual role of a working class Irish New Englander, a tough guy with a good heart, this time transplanted to the port of New Orleans. Now he’s Chris Farraday, a world-class smuggler – the best there is. He knows every trick and can sneak just about anything past border cops. He is descended from a long line of smugglers, and so are all his friends. But he’s been on the straight and narrow for years now, until his wife’s younger brother Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) loses some coke he’s trying to bring into the country. The sleazy, wimpy gangster Tim (an 
unrecognizable Giovanni Ribisi) wants restitution for the drugs or Andy will die, so Chris agrees to do one last caper – to smuggle, along with his former criminal mates, an enormous quantity of funny money. (Drugs are bad, but, counterfeit — who cares?) He leaves his wife and kids in the hands of his best friend Sebastian (Ben Foster), while he sails off to the Panama Canal in a freighter.
Now it’s up to him to somehow pick up the counterfeit money, get it back on deck and hidden in a container during the hour the ship is stalled in the canal.
The movie itself is billed as a thriller, but it’s actually a mash-up of a conventional caper movie crossed with a conventional action-thriller crime drama. I don’t know if the two genres quite match – caper’s are light, breezy movies about a master criminal and his buddies smoothly and ingeniously outwitting their powerful 
and arrogant enemies so they can pull of a big heist. (you expect to hear 1960’s TV jazz in the background) Action- thriller-dramas are violent movies about valiant heroes fighting off evil thugs, and risking their lives to save the ones they love (in this case his wife). They’re full of car chases and shootouts, panic and vengeance, jiggly hand held cameras, and people shouting Oh! Ah! Run – now’s our only chance! Contraband tries to fit both genres into one.
And it takes place in some parallel universe on the planet of Manly Men. Just gangs of guys everywhere, sailors on ships, groups of gangsters, guys in bars, guys behind bars, men pouring cement on a construction sites. Basically, it’s a NO GURLZ ALLOWED clubhouse, except for Chris’s victimized wife (Kate Beckinsale).
The most remarkable thing about this movie – and worth the admission — are the amazing vistas as the freighter makes its way through the Panama Canal. Chase scenes in and out of bright red containers lifted up by enormous cranes like some giant’s lego set. Really cool and great to watch. It was a fun popcorn movie, nothing more, but I’d like to see other movies by this young Icelandic director.
The Devil Inside
Dir: William Brent Bell
Isabella (Fernanda Andrade) was just a young girl when her mother Maria murdered three people and as locked up as criminally insane, and sent off to a hospital in Rome. But now, all grown up, she decides to make a documentary and find out the truth. You see, her mother wasn’t crazy – she was just possessed by the devil and hidden away by the Vatican (since the victims were two priests and a nun). So, off she goes! Once in the Vatican we follow her as she audits lectures on possession and meets some true believers who agree to sneak into the mental hospital and perform an exorcism on her mom.
Then she’ll be normal again, so they’ll free her mass-murderer mom let them all go back to America.
But things don’t work out exactly the way they want: they may have to face the evil of MDP multiple demon possession!
This is a pretty damned awful movie (damned?) – not very scary, not much suspense, not much horror in its lame Blair Witch–style. It also barely makes sense, with huge gaps in plot logic. Even the genre is confusing – it starts as a faux-documentary with talking heads and 
news clips, but gradually degenerates into something more like reality TV or youtube rants – with the various characters turning to the camera to whine about the others. By the end it’s a total confusing and disappointing mess of a mash-up.
But… it has some amazingly great and nuanced acting by Susan Crowley as the possessed, and mentally ill, Maria. Is there a prize for outstanding performances in terrible movies? Susan Crowley deserves one. (Evan Helmuth is also very good.) The Devil Inside is a stupid movie, but its style is a mash-up of genres that people couldn’t even comprehend 10 years ago.
Episode 1
Dir: Renzo Martens
Renzo, an artist from the Netherlands, goes to Chechnya with a handheld video camera to make art. And the art consists of him carrying a video camera and asking people in a war zone facile questions like how do they feel about being filmed, in a war zone, by an artist.
The thing is, people there – both the Chechens and the Russians — don’t get it. He’s a man with a camera so he must be a journalist, taking shots to show on TV. They’re angry – you take our pictures but life doesn’t get better. But without journalists no one would know what’s going on.
No, say others, he’s with the UN bringing foreign aid. When he asks them what they think of him, they say – it depends on what your distributing to us. Or maybe he’s from an NGO…
But no, he’s just an art tourist, taking pictures of war-torn, crumbling apartment buildings with a cheap video camera, and asking locals — blithely, naively, obtusely — what they think of him, how they feel about love, and if they like his looks. He flirts with a pretty girl, then leaves her after getting his art footage.
It’s a brilliant, and thoroughly upsetting and offensive, concept. Is it art? Is it a documentary? Is it a drama? Is it just self-promotion? Is it a comedy? Or is it just a home movie? I think it’s a mash-up of all of these, (and a prequel to his later “episode 3” shot in the Congo called “Enjoy Poverty”). But it really is like 
nothing I’ve ever seen before. Renzo could be another Borat or Bruno – except the character there’s no make-up or costume — he plays himself. And his films are both art and a parody of art.
The Devil Inside is now playing, Contraband opens today, check your local listings; and Renzo Martens’ films, including Episode 1, were recently shown by the Justine M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto, Canada.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies for CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site, Cultural Mining . com.
January 6, 2012. Guys Who Won’t Grow Up. Movies Reviewed: Jeff Who Lives At Home, Dark Horse, Starbuck
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies, for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM, looking at high-brow and low-brow movies, indie, cult, foreign, festival, genre and mainstream movies, helping you see movies with good taste, movies that taste good, and how to tell the difference.
It’s a New Year now, and everyone’s scrambling to make vows, resolutions and oaths to change their lives. And there’s one group that’s often makes the most earnest promises of all — I’m talking about that popular caricature, Guys Who Won’t Grow Up. In the movies, they tend to have dead-end jobs, play with toys, smoke pot, live in their parents’ basements and generally strike out with women, despite all their good intentions. So this week I’m looking at three movie, all of which played at TIFF last year, about grown-up boys who decide to change their lives. So all you couch potatoes, it’s time to get up, go out, and see some movies!
Jeff Who Lives at Home
Wri/Dir: Jay and Mark Duplass
Jeff (Jason Segel) lives at home – sits around his mother’s basement in his underwear, to be exact. He smokes pot, eats chips, watches TV, and waxes philosophical about the cosmos… while sitting on the toilet. He doesn’t get along with his older brother Pat anymore (Ed Helms), a self-centred square who neglects his wife. Pat’s a guy who’s supposed to look at a new home, but instead spends all their money on a Porsche on impulse. And now his wife doesn’t feel so great about their marriage. And Mom also notices a change in her cubicle job when her best friend tells her she has a secret admirer. So what’s going to happen?
Jeff, is a proto- string theorist (like the characters in the movie I Heart Huckabees) He’s always waiting for “signs” to tell him what to do.
Well, one day he’s forced to leave home for downtown Baton Rouge to pick up a bottle of glue for his mother (Susan Sarandon). But, when something catches his eye on an infomercial, followed by the words “CALL NOW!” at the same time as a strange, threatening wrong number calling for someone named “Kevin”, he gets sent off on a (seemingly) wild goose chase all around the city.
So Jeff embarks on this grand mission – one that eventually ties in 
with his brother’s failing marriage and his mother’s love life — because he knows, he just knows, that his actions will change the world.
This is a good, enjoyable comedy. I like the Duplass brothers, who usually make low-budget, ‘mumblecore”, semi-improvisational, super-realistic movies. They do tend to use annoying, jiggly hand-held cameras, but the movies are interesting enough that it doesn’t bother you after awhile. This one, Jeff who Lives at Home, is their biggest budget and most mainstream so far, with stuntmen, and chase scenes, and big name cast. But I like this direction they’re taking – it’s not a sell-out, it’s a fun, light comedy.
You could say Jeff is a “lite” version of the next character. Now think of the same guy, but 10-15 years later…
Dark Horse
Dir: Todd Solandz
Abe (Jordan Gelber) also lives with his parents, but he’s older, less attractive, fatter, and without any of the cute, endearing qualities that Jeff (who also lives at home) had. He works in his dad’s company, sitting in his glassed-in office, dressing like a white gangsta rapper, in track pants and T-shirts, with a gold name plate around his neck. He drives a bright yellow SUV, listens to hiphop, collects Tron Legacy memorabilia. And he despises his older brother who’s a doctor, and whom his parents idolize. He’s simultaneously arrogant, talentless and uninteresting. He’s the kind of guy who throws something toward a garbage can, says “two points!”… and then misses.
But at a Jewish wedding in suburban New Jersey (a hilarious scene where adults in wedding suits are all doing head spins and break-dancing) he meets Miranda (Selma Blair), a depressed but pretty, dark-haired woman who lives with her parents, after breaking up with her boyfriend Mahmoud. Abe is the worst person at picking up girls, possibly in the entire world. When he hits on a woman he says things like “Do you like jazz? NFL?” without bothering to 
listen to her answer before moving on to the next failed pick-up line. But somehow — for whatever reason — they end up dating.
Here’s where the movie gets really interesting (and a bit confusing). Abe decides to take the bull by the horns and change his life. The story goes off on these bizarre tangents. Things get bad with his lethargic parents (Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken) who finally put their collective foot down; the older secretary, Marie, at the office pursues her sexual crush on Abe; and he has 
other troubles with his plastic model collection. Abe can’t take it anymore.
I don’t want to give it away, but once again, Todd Solandz, who is such a good director, (with his painfully dark stories and funny-depressing characters) experiments once again with new narrative techniques, like unreliable narrators; total, sudden shifts in point of view – but without informing the viewers; and fantasy, delusions and dreams almost undistinguishable from reality. Wow. It’s a great movie that I hope will get released soon.
Starbuck
Dir: Ken Scott
David (Patrick Houad) is just not doing that well with his life. Everything just seems to be going wrong. He’s separated from his girlfriend, he’s bad at his job (delivering meat for his family business), and his money-making scheme, a grow-up, must be the only one in the world actually losing money: he owes 80 thousand to a bunch of violent thugs who want it back. His girlfriend – who’s pregnant with his kid – tells him he’d better change things if he wants to be that kid’s father. But these all seem like small potatoes when he’s hit by the biggest news of all – the sperm he anonymously donated at a fertility clinic 20 years go, was fertile. Very. He has 500 adult kids now, and 140 or so are planning a class-action suit to make him reveal his identity (he donated using only the nickname “Starbuck”.)
So he decides to secretly track down as many of his kids he can find, to help them out but without revealing his identity to them. There’s a lifeguard, a drug addict, a street musician, an effeminate goth, an aspiring actor… even if David’s own life is a total loss, maybe he can at least make his mark on the world by helping his many, many kids succeed. But the media pick up his story, making it harder and harder to remain hidden. Will he make it out of his various personal crises? Will he be forced to expose his identity to the world? Will his immigrant family ever feel proud of him? And will his pregnant girlfriend let him back into her life?
Starbuck is a really enjoyable, solid, feel-good commercial Quebec comedy, (from the people who brought us Good Cop, Bon Cop0. It’s playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox as part of the best 10 Canadian films series starting now, along with the new Cronenberg movie and Monsieur Lazhar.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies for CIUT 89.5 FM, and on my web site, culturalmining.com.
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