Cultural Mining

Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

Coyote vs ACME photos by Jeff Harris.

TIFF is just around the corner, but in the meantime let’s look at two new comedies opening this weekend. There’s a guy in Manchester obsessed with a woman and a coyote in Albuquerque obsessed with a bird.

But first, some Canadian movies coming to TIFF.

Canadian Curtain Raisers

There’s a slew of movies playing at TIFF this year, including many world premieres. I’m embargoed from reviewing them yet, and I haven’t seen most of them anyway, but here are some films that people are talking about, or I like the director or actors, or there’s just something about it that looks interesting.

Andrew Haigh — the English director who brought us Lean on Pete and All of Us Strangers — shot his latest one in the Canadian rockies. It’s called A Long Winter about a young man whose mom is lost in a blizzard.

Marie Clements’ How We Stand — she did Bones of Crows — is about an indigenous mom and her three daughters who are relocated from Oklahoma to LA in the 1950s.

Inuit filmmaker Nyla Innuksuk (Interview) whose first film Slash/Back was a science fiction monster movie set in Nunavut, is back again with In The Heart of the South a movie about an Inuk making a genre movie down south.

Out of Quebec comes Alexandre Franchi’s L’AUTRE, a comic thriller about a fantasy writer in a hospital bed beside a stranger in a coma after a shooting. It stars the charismatic Pierre-Yves Cardinal from Simple comme Sylvain and Tom on the Farm.

Acadian director Denis Côté is bringing Nobody’s Violence to TIFF. It’s about a strange woman who works Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) group.  I want to see this because I liked his movie Ghost Town Anthology in 2019 — there’s a mystical quality to his films.

Everyone’s talking about Sean Menard’s Run, Terry Run, a documentary on Terry Fox’s iconic journey and what was happening behind the scenes.

I don’t know much about Smudge the Blades except that it’s a hockey comedy and Cody Lightning is pretty funny.

Toronto writer David Bezmozgis has adapted his own novel The Betrayers into a political thriller set in Ukraine. 

Géssica Généus’s Marie Madeleine reimagines the biblical story of Mary Madeline within the Haitian community of Montreal. I’ve heard amazing things about this one.

Rémi St-Michel’s Toy Gun Bandit is a teenage heist movie that looks pretty interesting.

Justin Ducharme’s Seventeen is a drama about one day in the life of queer indigenous sex workers in Vancouver.  

And finally, I don’t talk about short films — too many features already — but I thought I’d mention two: Yung Chang’s (Wuhan, Wuhan, This is not a Movie, Fruit Hunters, ) The Highway, about a rich woman and a hit-and-run; and Zarrar Khan’s incel rom-com The Lion Does Not Concern Himself.

These are all Canadian and all playing at TIFF, starting 12 days from now.

Finding Emily

Dir: Alicia MacDonald

Owen (Spike Fearn) is a young romantic in his 20s at Manchester University. He has a unibrow and starry eyes. He met a woman named Emily at the campus nightclub and he can’t get her out of his head. They talked, danced and kissed that night Was it love at first sight? But the number she left him doesn’t work and he doesn’t know how to find her. So he starts posting handmade flyers around the school, in hope that she’ll contact him. The problem is he’s at the university but he’s not a student there; he’s a sound engineer who handles the amps and lighting at university events.  And the administrators don’t like him snooping around or stalking their students. 

Luckily he finds someone willing to help him, a psychology grad student named… Emily! (Angourie Rice: Every Day, Steal Away).  She has blonde, curly hair and is smart as hell. Academically at least. Socially, she’s a bit of a washout, allowing Tristan, the guy she’s crushing on, to treat her like crap. Maybe that’s why she’s writing her thesis on the psychosis of romantic love. It’s just an evolutionary hangover, she says. And she has to present her research findings to the committee in time to keep her student visa and scholarship (she’s American.) So she decides to help Owen find his mythical Emily, while secretly using him as the subject of her thesis. She creates an “Emily database” for him complete with the emails of all the Emilies at the school. Will Emily get her scholarship? And will Owen ever find his real Emily?

Finding Emily is a classic rom-com that follows most of the typical tropes. It’s cute but ridiculous. It’s written and directed by women so avoids some of the more painfully sexist bits you often see, but instead mainly directs its bile at other women, whether feminists, political activists or influencers. And the plot is ludicrous, with Owen portrayed as totally clueless about the place where he works all day,  and academics as effete and prissy morons. I did like the music: the soundtrack is all by local bands over the past 40 years, from New Order to Oasis and beyond. And best of all, Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice are both way better than the script they were given.  They’re adorable and engaging, as are many of the very large supporting cast.

Finding Emily is no masterpiece — it’s simplistic and superficial —  but it would make a cute date movie.

Coyote vs ACME

Dir: Dave Green (reviews: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Earth to Echo, )

Avery, Jones & Maltese is a fly-by-night law firm on the wrong side of the tracks in Albuquerque. They specialize in low-rate lawsuits against the city’s manufacturing giant ACME, which always land up as small, out-of-court settlements for the plaintiff. But everything changes when an unusual client shows up at their door. Wile E. Coyote is a self-described genius, who spends most of his days in the desert, trying, but never succeeding, in catching a roadrunner, because the bird is just too fast.

Despite repeated failures, he continues his Sisyphean task, with the hope that someday, somehow he will catch that roadrunner. He’s at the law firm that day because he has had enough. He wants to sue ACME for decades of faulty merchandise. Everything the Coyote bought from ACME — from magnetic ball bearings, to missiles to anvils — has always malfunctioned or misfired, repeatedly exploding in the coyote’s face.

He wants ACME to pay and he wants the world to know what they’ve done. (Keep in mind he never actually speaks in this movie.) His lawyer, Kevin Avery, on the other hand (Will Forte), is not equipped to handle such a big case, especially dealing with their cutthroat corporate lawyer (John Cena).

But Kevin’s niece Paige Avery (Lana Condor) is still young and idealistic. She wants Wile E Coyote to see justice. But what they don’t know is Wile E Coyote’s complaint is just the tiff of the iceberg, with a vast sinister conspiracy happening behind closed doors at ACME. Can they uncover the truth? Will the case ever make it to court? Or will corporate power crush the tiny law firm, the coyote, and all their friends, before they make it trial?

Coyote vs ACME is the much-anticipated and finally released brilliant comedy I’ve been waiting years to see. It’s hilarious. The film seamlessly incorporates live action with cartoon animation in a way that actually makes sense. (It takes place within a Looney Tunes universe where humans and cartoon characters can co-exist.) And it resurrects all the classic Warner Brothers characters keeping intact their challenge of authority by the underdogs, their sardonic sense of humour as well as an extreme level of comic violence. (Ironically it was Warner Bros themselves that tried to bury this whole film years ago, until it was finally purchased by small distributors and released.) It also pays homage to animation greats like Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese.

Maybe it is a cultural bias, or a generational thing, or maybe I’m just a Looney Tunes fanboy, but I found this movie laugh-out-loud funny, with its witty, cruel and subversive tone. And maybe I’m wrong but I didn’t notice a single case of product placement. It’s loaded with hidden allusions and inside jokes about the cartoons themselves, with some characters — like Pepe La Pew or Speedy Gonzales — appearing for only a split second, but with perfect timing. Other characters are presented in unexpected ways, like Tweety Pie and Foghorn Leghorn as villains and Granny in a romantic role. 

Old-skool WB cartoons were rarely over three minutes long but they managed to keep this movie going for 100 minutes, and I don’t think I stopped smiling or laughing the entire time.

I absolutely loved Coyote vs ACME.

Coyote vs ACME and Finding Emily both open this weekend in Toronto; check your local listings.

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website  culturalmining.com