Friends. Films reviewed: Blackberry, Book Club: the Next Chapter, The Maiden
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Toronto Spring film Festival season continues with Reelabilities on right now, with pay what you can admission to these fully accessible films, by, for and about disabled and deaf people. And on the horizon look out for Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ film fest starting on May 25.
This week I’m looking at three new movies opening this weekend — two comedies and a drama — from the US and Canada. There are longboarders in Calgary, wedding planners in Tuscany, and entrepreneurs and engineers playing with their Blackberries.
Blackberry
Co-Wri/Dir: Matt Johnson
It’s 1996 in Waterloo, Ontario. Research in Motion is a motley crew of programmers and engineers developing products in a strip mall. They hold onto their college-boy culture (it’s mainly guys), playing music, eating junk food, joking around and watching movies when they’re not writing code. But they work their asses off, too. They want to launch a cel phone like nothing the world has ever seen before. RIM was founded by Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Matt Johnson). Blackberry would let you send fully encrypted texts wherever you are using only your thumbs and a built-in keyboard. It’s the first “smart phone”.
They are brilliant at inventing things and getting them to work, but less skilled on the financial side. In fact, they are deeply in debt, having been double-crossed by a silicon valley corporation. In walks financial wizard Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton). He doesn’t know anything about the tech side, but he was impressed by their pitch. So impressed he promises to bail them out, inject cash, and get the cel phone off the ground. In return he declares himself co-CEO (to their objections). And within a few years, Blackberry has captured half the cel phone market. But can they survive the advent of the iPhone.
Blackberry is a hilarious and brilliant look at the rise and fall
of a Canadian device that once dominated the global market. It’s full of geeks nerds and douchey pricks, tremendous discoveries and idiotic errors that, in hindsight, could have been avoided. It’s shot in that 20 oughts retro mode, and Baruchel and Howerton will amaze you. As will many of the smaller parts — like Sungwon Cho and Michael Ironside. I’ve been watching Matt Johnson (co-writer, director and costar) since his first film The Dirties appeared at the Toronto After Dark Festival a decade ago. His talent is unique, weird, and quirky; what could have been a dull corporate biopic gets the full Matt Johnson treatment and ends up as a perfect period piece.
Blackberry is a great tech-geek flick.
Book Club: The Next Chapter
Co-Wri/Dir: Bill Holderman
Viv, Carol, Diane and Sharon have known each other for more than 50 years but live in various cities across the US. Viv (Jane Fonda) is a bon vivant and advocate of free sex, Carol (Mary Steenbergen) is a chef, Sharon (Candice Bergen) is a judge, now retired, and Diane (Diane Keaton) is just herself, a flibertigibbet-y worrywart. But as they adjust to retirement in their seventies+ (up to 85), they feel the need for something new. Viv, after a lifetime denouncing the patriarchy and heteronormative institution of marriage, suddenly decides to exchange rings with her longtime lover. Seeing this her three friends decide they must go to Italy to celebrate her engagement. And after lots of hemming and hawing, they are off to Rome, Venice and Tuscany, celebrating the culture, scenery, fashion, shopping and food Italy offers them. But can they overcome all the obstacles they encounter on the way?
Book Club: the Next Chapter is a comedy road movie about 
sexually-active elderly women having a romp together in Europe. It’s also an unoriginal, cliche-ridden touristic guide to Italy: from riding gondolas in Venice to ogling marble statues in Rome. But even as I was cringing at the truly awful jokes (like Chef Gianni wants to show me his Cucina… what should I do? I bet chef Gianni’s cucina is really big!) I was smiling through the whole dreadful movie. Why? Because to see Fonda, Keaton, Bergen and Steenburgen — plus the great Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini — in a movie together is fun, even a godawful movie like this one… and they looked like they were having a really good time.
The Maiden
Wri/Dir: Graham Foy
Kyle and Colton are best buds at a high school in suburban Calgary. They’re on their longboards, skating across their neighbourhood till it turns into vacant lots, open fields, and forest, a river and railway tracks. Kyle (Jackson Sluiter) is a rebel, he likes hardcore music and carries spray cans to put his tag Maiden on every bridge and surface they pass. Colton (Marcel T. Jiménez) is the taller one but more hesitant and introspective. He lets Kyle take the lead but gleefully joins in smashing up a TV or giving a ritual burial to a dead cat they find in a half-built house. But then something terrible happens and Colton is left all alone to deal with his devastating loss. The second part of the film retells many of the events this time using the point of view of a shy young woman named Whitney (Hailey Ness). But time, reality, and death are all fluid in this film, and not what you think.
The Maiden is an amazing — and constantly surprising — first film by a new director, originally from Calgary, about 
friendship and loss, bullying and cruelty but also about finding the joy of life. All the main players are first-time actors who play their parts perfectly, while the photography is beautifully shot on grainy 16mm film.
This movie has so many jarring images — like Colton in a red hoodie in the school hall, drowning in a sea of cowboy hats during the Calgary Stampede — images that stick with you long after the film is over. People singing to songs only they can hear. It presents life shattering events but without ramming it down your throat. So much is left unsaid — and that’s what gives The Maiden its unexpected power.
Really good movie.
Blackberry, Book Club: The Next Chapter and The Maiden all 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.
Teens. Films reviewed: Bernadette, Minding the Gap, Carmen & Lola
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
In your teenaged years, as you span the time between child and adulthood, it’s hard to separate true love from first crush. This week I’m looking at three such comic of age stories. There’s a 15 year old boy with a crush on a French woman; three skateboarders trapped in a rust belt town, and two young women in Spain touched by chance.
Bernadette
Wri/Dir: John Psathis
It’s the summer of 1994 in Forest Lake, a suburb near Chicago. Archie (Sam Straley) is a 15 year old freshman who lives with his single mom (Sarah Shirkey). He plays in a garage band with two other nerds, his best friends Ken and Martin (Johnnie Lim, James Guytin) . Archie has just one goal: to meet a beautiful, but unapproachable 
exchange student named Bernadette before she moves back to France in the Fall. Problem is she’s a senior, a lifeguard at the local pool, and is beautiful beyond belief. She also has an older boyfriend, a French prof at the local community college. And she’s surrounded by a gang of bullies, led by by the 
cruel and vindictive Richtor (Tommy Philbin).
Luckily he gets a job at the park where Bernadette (Marilyn Bass) works. And his boss, Dixon (James Psathis) shows him the ropes. Dixon is a legend at his school — tall, charismatic and known for his sexual prowess. He keeps polaroids of all the women 
he’s slept with on the wall of the tool shed he’s living in. Anyone else would kill for such a mentor. But not Archie. He can’t stand Dixon, because of his latest conquest. No, it’s not Bernadette he’s sleeping with, it’s Archie’s 33-year-old mom! Will Archie come to terms with Dixon, overcome the bully 
Richtor, and convince Bernadette that he’s her one true love?
Bernadette is a typical boy-meets-girl coming of age story, but, despite the title is barely about Bernadette at 
all. It’s about a fatal summer in the life of the hero. This is a cute, indie movie, with a fun cast and an enjoyable story. The plot is not especially original – you can predict most of the plot turns a mile away – but it is nicely done and neatly constructed. And does every new film need to be super-special?
An enjoyable teenage romcom is good enough for me.
Minding the Gap
Dir: Bing Liu
Rockford is a small city in Northern Illinois. It’s filled with vacant warehouses and empty factories, cracking sidewalks and vacant lots. All the empty space makes it a paradise for skateboards and the guys who skate them. This documentary follows the lives of three of them, Kiere, Zack and Bing. Aside from their love of skating, they also share dark pasts. All three of them endured
violence and abuse at the hands of their parents. Kiere’s dad beat him as corproaral punishment to discipline him when he did something wrong. He resented it at the time, but now desperately misses his father who died when he was teen. Zack also comes from a family with a history of violence and alcoholism… which he seems to be carrying forward in 
his own relationship with his girlfriend. A relationship mainly based on their baby boy, not any love they once had for each other. Bing’s story is the most hidden of the three. He coaxes it out of his mother who admits her second husband, Bing’s stepdad, abused both of them…though the nature of his abuse remains unclear.
Minding the Gap follows the three boys as they grow 
into men in their 20s, all captured by Bing’s video camera. It starts as just shots of the three of them gliding down the streets, but gradually reveals, in a series of interviews, traumatic moments in their lives. And life in a rust belt town, gradually being emptied of its people. I liked this doc, though confessional, reality-show-type docs aren’t my favourite format. It’s a first film, but surprisingly has already been nominated as Best Feature Documentary in this year’s Oscars.
Check it out.
Carmen & Lola
Wri/Dir: Arantxa Echevarría
It’s a housing project outside present day Madrid. Lola (Zaira Romero) is a prickly 16 year old graffiti artist who wants to get out of this place. Her illiterate parents, Paco and Flor, and her little brother Miguel are happy with their life here. They run a stall at an outdoor market, attend an evangelical church and celebrate birthdays and weddings in the traditional Roma style. Lots of singing and dancing with their friends relatives. But Lola wants more. With the help of 
Paqui (Carolina Yuste) who works at the local community centre she’s trying to pull herself out of traditional roles. At the market she meets the beautiful and glamorous Carmen (Rosy Rodríguez) who also works there. She’s engaged to Lola’s first cousin, and dreams of becoming a hairdresser, one of the few professions open to Roma women.
For Lola, it’s love at first site. She’s enchanted by everything about Carmen, from her little bird-shaped earings to her lithe body and beautiful face. Carmen is everything she desires and she paints grafitti art tributes her on local walls. She teaches her how to swim, so someday they might go to the beach in Malaga together. But Carmen is shocked when Lola expresses her love to her. I’m normal, Lola, not disgusting like you, she says. Kiss a boy, and you’ll see what you’re 
missing. Lola counters, kiss me, or you’ll never know for sure. Will Carmen and Lola become lovers? Or will her strong community ties make that impossible?
Carmen & Lola is a wonderful romantic drama about an unlikely couple. It’s shot in a realistic style, celebrating Roma culture in Spain, the church services, the music and traditional costumes. She uses non-actors for many of the roles, and never shies away from the racism and poverty they face on a daily basis.
This is a very good love story.
Carmen & Lola and Minding the Gap are both playing at the TIFF Next Wave festival. All tickets are free if you’re 25 or under. Go to tiff.net for details. And Bernadette is premiering at Vancouver’s Just for Laughs and will open later this year.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Young and Old, New and Old. Films reviewed: mid90s, What They Had, Summer with Monika
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
Mark your calendars folks, as Toronto’s Fall Film Festival season continues in November. ReelAsian has great anime, dramas, docs and comedies from South, East, and Southeast Asia. Ekran Polish film festival opens with Pawel Pawlikowski’s fantastic Cold War — about two lovers seperated by the Iron Curtain — and Toronto’s own 22 Chaser. And the EU film festival has one film from each country in the European Union, with some real treasures waiting to be discovered… and all screenings are free!
This week I’m looking at movies new and old, about people young and old. There’s a love story about young adults in Stockholm made in the 1950s, a coming-of-age story about a young LA teenager set in the 1990s, and a family drama about an elderly Chicago couple set in the right now.
mid90s
Wri/Dir: Jonah Hill
It’s LA in the mid 1990s. 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) lives with his single mom and frustrated big brother Ian (Lucas Hedges). Ian uses him as his personal punching bag so Stevie stays away from him. Out in the city he discovers a skate shop and cautiously approaches the older kids who hang there. There’s Ruben (Gio Galicia) is a brooding kid, a bit older than Stevie, who tells him what’s what. Ray (Na-Kell Smith) is the group’s rudder who tries to keep them out of trouble. Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin), is a skinny nerd who records everything with his video camera. And then there’s the daring and 
reckless one with blonde dreads (Olan Prenatt) whose name is made up of two words I can’t say on radio (but rhyme with Truck Spit).
At first, they think of Charlie as just a kid, but he proves his mettle by doing the most dangerous rides and jumps… and ends up in hospital for it! Soon he’s a real member of their nameless club. 
Together they own the streets with their boards. But can a 13-year-old have a good time without ending on drugs, in jail, or dead?
Mid90s is a fun and light coming-of-age story, seen through the eyes of a kid with much older friends. He encounters sex, drugs, and Jackass-style extreme exploits, for the first time, all projected against a non-stop blanket of 90s music. I’m always dubious whenever a Hollywood moviestar decides to make a film, but Jonah Hill does a great job on this one. It’s low budget, an enjoyable story, simple but effective. It’s moving, funny and believable. without trying too hard or trying change the world. Sunny Suljic is great as Stevie, as are the rest of the gang, mainly played by non-actors who skate.
I like this one.
What They Had
Wri/Dir: Elizabeth Chomko
It’s a snowy Christmastime in Chicago. and Bridget (Hillary Swank), is flying there from sunny California to spend the holiday with her family. She’s travelling with her daughter Emma on college vacation, and is met at the airport by her grumpy brother Nick (Michael Shannon). He owns a bar and lives in the back room with his on-again off-again girlfriend. But they’re mainly there to see their parents, a retired couple in their 70s. They’re 
devout catholics. Burt (Robert Forster) reads the obits each day yo make sure he’s not in them, while Ruth (Blythe Danner) has simpler pursuits. They’re a happily married couple, in sickness and in health, till death do they part.
And that’s why the family is really there.
Ruth is prone to wandering, walking off aimlessly into the snow, and showing up in a hospital or at the railway tracks. And she mistakes a stapler for the 
telephone. She has Alzheimer’s and Nick wants to ship her off for “memory care” and Burt to assisted living, alone somewhere. Burt says no way. Life’s not bells and whistles, it’s hard work and we’re still very much in love. But Bridget has her Mom’s power of attorney. Whose side will she take — her father’s or her brother’s? And will the secrets uncovered by this family reunion lead to a permanent rupture in all of their lives?
What They Had is a low-key family drama with a powerhouse cast. Any movie
Away From Her
with Michael Shannon, Hilary Swank, Blythe Danner and Robert Forster in it is worth seeing just for that. But I can’t help comparing Blythe Danner to Julie Christie in Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, that great drama, also about Alzheimer’s. (They even look the same!)
This one is much easier to watch, though, trading heavy drama for family nostalgia.
Summer with Monika (1953)
Dir: Ingmar Bergman
It’s the 1950s in working class Stockholm. Harry (Lars Ekborg) is a 19 year old at his first job, delivering boxes of glass by bicycle cart. (He looks like Tintin.) Harry lives with his ailing dad in the family home. At work, he is constantly yelled at for being late or 
filling in the wrong forms. Not fun. Monika (Harriet Andersson) is even younger, and from a poor part of town. At home she’s bugged by her drunken dad, or teased by the little brats. And her workplace could be used as a textbook for sexual harassment laws 50 years later. She’s assaulted, groped and insulted all day long.
So when Monika sees Harry, a total stranger, in a bar, she takes the plunge. I hate this job, I hate this city, and I hate 
my life, let’s just get the hell out of here! Harry, though shocked by her forwardness, realizes he doesn’t like his life much, either. And he does like Monika. So soon, they’re off in a motorboat to a distant place. They set up camp on a rocky shore, and spend their time picking wild mushrooms and frolicking naked on the rocks. Is this love? But reality rears its ugly head. Lelle (John Harryson), Monika’s ex-boyfriend, is stalking them. There’s no clean clothes and their food is running out. And Monika discovers she’s pregnant.
Summer with Monika is 65 years old, but Ingmar Bergman’s timeless love story still feels fresh and vibrant. It’s shot in beautiful black and white in a realistic style. There are a few seconds of discreet nudity but apparently was very shocking when it was released in the US. (Didn’t help that the distributor marketed it as “The story of a bad girl” who was “Naughty and 19“!) But in Europe it proved highly influential for generation of filmmakers. Try to catch this movie while it’s still playing.
What They Had and mid90s both open today in Toronto; check your local listings. Summer with Monika is now playing as part of the TIFF Cinematheque retrospective Bergman 100, showing virtually all of his movies, in a beautifully programmed series.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
More Films by Women. Films reviewed: Never Saw it Coming, Skate Kitchen
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
TIFF promises one third of all movies showing this year will be directed by women. This was virtually unheard of even a few years ago. But I’m finding — especially with indie productions — that there’s been a sea change with loads of good movies being made by women. This week I’m looking at two such movies, one from Canada and another from south of the border. There’s a body hidden beneath the ice in Sudbury and a subculture hidden between the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
Never Saw it Coming
Dir: Gail Harvey
Wri: Linwood Barklay
Keisha (Emily Hampshire) is a psychic in Sudbury Ontario. She specializes in locating lost relatives, dead or alive. By touching a personal item she has visions pointing straight to a grave site. But is she authentic? Keisha lives with her young red head son Matt (Keegan Hedley) and her on-again, off again boyfriend Kirk. He moved in with her four months ago but has yet to pay rent.
She’s saving up to buy her son the keyboard he’s always 
wanted but money is scarce. So she agrees to pull off a onetime scam, involving parents desperate to locate their drug-addicted son.
At the same time she searches out a family with a mother who has gone missing. (The movie opens with her car sinking into a frozen lake as the woman screams for help) The missing woman’s husband Wendel (Eric Roberts) and daughter Melissa (Katie Boland) have appealed for help on TV, along with police detective Wedmore (Tamara Podemski). Keisha sees this as a 
chance to locate a missing person and make some quick cash. But her meeting goes terribly wrong, and her chaotic life becomes impossible to handle. Now she has to deal with a suspicious detective, her partner in crime turned junkie blackmailer, and threats from her volatile, layabout boyfriend.
Can her visions – if they actually exist – save Keisha? Or is she heading for the big house?
Never Saw it Coming is a short but credible Canadian mystery thriller, with lots of scurrilous characters without many sympathetic good guys. It seems like almost everyone in Sudbury is a lowlife. Still, I always enjoy a good noirish Canadian movie, despite its flaws. Emily Hampshire and Tamara Podemski as the psychic and cop in a battle of wits, stand out. And Eric Roberts is great as a sketchy schemester.
Skate Kitchen
Dir: Crystal Moselle
Camille (Michelle Vinberg) is an 18 year old vegan who lives with her mom in Long Island. She has long hair, glasses and wears shorts, white socks and thrasher T shirts. She spends most of her time hanging at a nearby skate park practicing her moves, despite the catcalling and abuse she takes from the guys there. But when a mishap sends her to hospital with 
gushing blood between her legs, her mother forbids her from using a skateboard again. But skating is her life. What can she do?
Find a crew on instagram to skate with. An all female one. She joins them in Manhattan and makes fast friends. They skate the city, exchange stories and defend themselves against asshole 
guys. There’s strength in numbers. After a big fight with her mom she ends up moving in with Janay (Ardelia Lovelace), one of the girls in the group.
She also gets a day job, as a cashier in a super. There she meets Devon (Jaden Smith) who works in the stock room. He’s a skater too, with dyed red hair, and asks her to let him snap her pics. She does some solid moves on the top of a 
skyscraper near the empire state building. And sparks seem to fly.
The problem is she likes him, but Devon and Janay used to be a thing. And she never got over their nasty breakup. Can Camille keep her relationship with Devon a secret from her fiercely loyal crew? Or will her life collapse like a house of cards?
Skate Kitchen is a great coming-of-age story set within the world of skateboarding – the music, fights, drugs, sexual experimentation, tampons, comeradery, as well as misogynistic bragadoccio on the male side.
This movie, though, is unique in that it’s painted from a female point of view, a community usually totally absent from anything skate-related. It’s modelled on a real group, also called Skate Kitchen, with many of the actors playing roles based on themselves, including Vinberg, its founder. This gives it a very realistic feel, and provides a genuine look at a seldom seen subculture. This movie’s the real thing and I liked it.
Skate Kitchen and Never Saw it Coming both open today in Toronto; check your local listings.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
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