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.