Future/Past. Films reviewed: James vs His Future Self, Resistance
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
I love watching movies in theatres, but under a lockdown that’s not an option. Here a few ways to watch films at home for free. Kanopy offers an excellent selection of films which you sign out using your library card – up to eight a month. New additions include bizarre films like Borgman (review ), comedies like Young Adult (review ), and classics like Warren Beatty’s Reds. Look for it on your public library website. The National Film Board of Canada has tons of movies, documentaries and animation online now for free. Go to nfb.ca/films. And if you’re francophone or want to practice your French, myfrenchfilmfestival.com offers free short films and animation for kids.
But new movies – movies you pay for – are still being released online. This week I’m looking at two new movies. There’s a WWII drama about a famous entertainer’s encounters with the enemy in occupied France; and a science fiction comedy about a man who encounters his future self in Canada.
James vs. His Future Self
Dir: Jeremy LaLonde
James (Jonas Chernick) is a particle physicist who works at a lab. His obsession? Time travel. He lives at home with his sister Meredith (Tommie-Amber Pirie). Their mom and dad were killed in a terrible accident 15 years earlier, so she functions as his de facto parents, tearing him away from his scientific calculations long enough to eat a meal or get some sleep. James works alongside the beautiful and brilliant Courtney (Cleopatra Coleman) a science geek like him. She’s up for a position at the 
CERN Accelerator in Geneva. James harbours a secret crush on her, but are the feelings mututal? They do get together regularly for video nights with Chinese take out – but that’s the entire extent of his social 
life. Until his world is turned upside down by a taxi driver named Jimmy (Daniel Stern).
Jimmy is a crusty old guy with a greying chin beard. He loves croissants, music, and waxing lyrical about living in the present. But he has a dark side as well. (He could be Ram Das’s evil twin). More important, he claims to be James’s future self. Jimmy says James will invent the time machine, with fame, fortune and a 
stellar career devoted to science. Hooray! Except Jimmy came back from the future to stop him: don’t do it or you’ll end up like me: tired, bitter and alone. Fall in love, have fun, enjoy your life. Can James reconcile his future incarnation with his current scientific obsession? Can he get along with Meredith? Or fall in love in with Courtney? Or is this all just a hoax?
James vs His Future Self is a surprisingly good time-travel comedy, that does it all with virtually no special effects. Daniel Stern (Breaking Away; Home Alone) as “future James” looks absolutely nothing like Jonas Chernick (Borealis interview, A Swingers Weekend review)… but it doesn’t matter. Why use expensive de-aging technology (like in the Irishman review) when you can just say “time travel messes you up.” Jeremy LaLonde (Sex after Kids – interview; The Go-Getters- review) is always doing these weird and quirky comedies, and they just get better and better.
Stern and Chernick are great as the two James, and Coleman and Pirie also show their stuff. The movie was shot up north in beautiful Sudbury. My only question is: How come there are two Canadian movies that opened in 2020 with a female lead moving to Switzerland to work on the CERN Supercollider? Doesn’t matter. James vs His Future Self is a good film to enjoy at home.
Resistance
Wri/Dir: Jonathan Jakubowicz
It’s the late 1930s in Strasbourg, France. Marcel (Jesse Eisenberg) works at the family Kosher butcher shop run by his dad (Karl Markovics: The Counterfeiters). But he’d rather be at his night job: impersonating Charlie Chaplin onstage at a downtown brothel. But war is looming, so he starts work at an orphanage inside a huge castle for little kids fleeing Nazi Germany. Two sisters, Emma and Mila (Clémence 
Poésy, Vica Kerekes) also work there and Marcel really likes Emma. (Feelings are mutual.) The tiny refugees are frightened and speak no French, but Marcel discovers he can communicate without words. He starts performing silently as a mime, expanding the skills he learned at theatre school. He’s a natural — one performance and they forget all their troubles. He also teaches them how to be silent themselves, especially if they’re being chased by Nazi soldiers. 
Then comes the invasion, and they all flee south to Limoges. There he and his friends all join the resistance to fight the German occupation, led by the notorious Klaus Barbie (Matthias Schweighöfer) known as the Butcher of Lyons. He learns to forge passports and perform acts of derring-do. But can he lead the orphans to safety in the Swiss Alps?
At the beginning of Resistance I was cringing and squirming in my seat. All the actors, including Jesse Eisenberg, speak in that annoying, generic, fake European accent. Worse than that, it looked like it was going to be about orphans, clowns and the holocaust, a potentially lethal combination. Something like Jerry Lewis’s 
legendary, infamous lost film The Day the Clown Cried. Luckilly, Resistance isn’t bad at all. It borrows from a lot of movies about the German occupation, especially Melville’s Army of Shadows, but it has many new scenes: hiding, escape, chase. It’s actually quite good, very classic in style, feeling like movies from 50-60 
years ago. More interesting still, this is a biopic about Marcel Marceau, the most famous mime anywhere, ever. I never knew he was in the French resistance. This is a movie with an accomplished international cast (from across Europe, North and South America) many of whom appeared in other WWII dramas (Son of Saul, The Counterfeiters) and a Venezuelan director. So if you’re looking for an historical movie complete with thrills and tears, Resistance is one to watch.
James vs His Future Self and Resistance are both available now online.
This is Daniel Garber at the Movies each Friday morning on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website culturalmining.com.
In the Trash. Movies Reviewed: A Swingers Weekend, The Go-Getters, Isle of Dogs
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
The Canadian Film Fest is on now, bringing lots of new movies to the big screen, movies made right here in Toronto and across the country. Comedies, dramas and real life stories.
Hollywood movies often glamourize everyday life with an idealized view of the world the average person can never attain. But sometimes movies look in the opposite direction… downward, toward the gutter. This week I’m looking at movies set among the trash. There’s an island of garbage filled with abandoned dogs, a couple of ne’er-do-wells who live in rubbish, and a married couple who risk trashing their marriage for a weekend getaway.
A Swingers Weekend
Wri/Dir: Jon E. Cohen
Lisa and Dan (Erin Karpluk – Being Erica, Randal Edwards) are a power couple. She’s in real estate and he’s CEO at an energy drink corporation, and they’re taking a break from their Toronto jobs for a weekend retreat in a lakeside villa up in cottage country. They’ve invited the attractive TJ and Skai (Michael Xavier, Erin Agostino) — he’s an artist, she’s into yoga – for a gourmet dinner and a weekend of kinky sex. But their planned foursome gains a fifth and sixth wheel when unexpected guests show up at the door. Geoffrey and Fiona (Jonas Chernik, Mia Kirchner) are Dan’s old friends whose marriage is falling apart. Can a weekend of bed-swapping inject new life into the respective couples’ relationships? And what are their real motives behind this swingers’ retreat?
A Swingers Weekend is a cute comedy that’s surprisingly tame. No nudity, it’s more of a social satire than a bedroom farce.
The Go-Getters
Dir: Jeremy LaLonde
Owen and Lacie (Aaron Abrams, Tomie Amber Pirie) are an odd couple. She’s a streetwalker who works for a disabled pimp called Cerebral Paulie, who keeps her addicted to oxycodone. He’s a nearly homeless alcoholic who mooches drinks from his brother’s skid row bar. He robbed her of her last fiver when she was ODing in a puddle of vomit on the bathrooom floor. It was hate at first site. But circumstances conspire to make them work together so they can buy bus tickets to Brockville to renovate an abandoned home.
They try robbing panhandlers, selling sex to teens, and fleecing buskers, but nothing seems to work. Will they ever escape from hideous Toronto? The Go-Getters is an unusual look at the lowest of the low in downtown Toronto. But guess what – this is a comedy! Yup, I’m not joking. Abrams as Owen looks like a younger and dumber Dr House (Hugh Laurie), and Pirie is truly unique as a loud-mouthed hooker with a heart of lead.
Isle of Dogs
Dir: Wes Anderson
It’s Japan sometime in the future. Megasaki in Uni prefecture is a big city controlled by the evil and corrupt Kobayashi dynasty. The Kobayashi clan own everything from the golf courses to the amusement parks and pharmaceutical labs. And they are all cat lovers who despise dogs. The dogs all come down with an odd disease called snout flu. Mayor Kobayashi – under the thumb of the corpse-like Major Domo – declares all dogs persona non grata. To save the city from 
infection, he says, he is banishing all the city’s dogs to Trash Island off the coast. This even includes his nephew Atari’s dog Spots. (Atari was adopted by his distant uncle when his parents died in a train crash.)
But when Atari flies to Trash Island in a toy airplane to rescue his pooch, he discovers a strange world rarely seen by humans. It’s ruled by gangs of alpha dogs, headed by a team of five: former pets Duke, Rex, King and Boss, as well as the mysterious Chief, a stray who likes to fight. (He bites.) They vow to help Atari find his dog Spots… or die trying.
Meanwhile, back in Megasaki, student journalists — led by exchange student Tracy — smell a skunk among the cats. They sense there’s a conspiracy targeting dogs and – with the help of a hacker — they vow to save the dogs and the missing boy Atari, and to make City Hall pay for their crimes. But will they make it in time?
Isle of Dogs is an epic fantasy made with stop-motion animation. The humans speak Japanese (with voiceover translation) and the dogs speak a stilted Japanese English. The story sounds simple and a bit goofy, but it’s not. It’s pure, non-stop eye candy, with art and illustration 
flooding your brain at the pace of a Simpsons episode.
It feels like Wes Anderson made a list of all English words derived from the Japanese — yakuza, sumo, sushi, geisha, samurai, bonsai, kabuki, haiku, anime, manga, otaku, cos-ple, taiko — and worked them all into the film. The thing is, it’s not cheap laughs and cultural plundering, it’s lovingly, respectfully, and exquisitely reproduced.
The constant barrage of images includes Japanese pop art, manga, ukiyo-e, 
silhouettes, and 2-D animation, all portrayed with a futuristic/retro/ steampunk feel (if such a thing is possible). Wes Anderson has done stop- motion animation before — The Fantastic Mister Fox — but this one is a quantum leap beyond that. None of Mister Fox‘s nudge-nudge, wink-wink snark in this movie; just affectionately rendered geek culture.
Isle of Dogs is stunning to watch. I’ve seen it twice now, and want to see it again, as soon as possible. It’s exquisite, beautiful, awe-inducing… I’m running out of adjectives. I love this movie, and if you revel in the visual and all things Japanese, you must see this animated film.
Isle of Dogs opens today in Toronto; check your local listings. The Go Getters and other films are playing this weekend at the Canadian Film Fest. This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Friday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com.
Daniel Garber talks with writer/director Jeremy Lalonde about his new comedy Sex After Kids
Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.
What do these people have in common? A lesbian couple, a single british woman, a newly married couple with a baby, an agent married to an ex-model, and a pair of grandparents? They all have kids and they all wonder what happened to their sex lives.
A funny new comedy, shot in Toronto and opening today, asks the age-old question: What happens to Sex after Kids? Writer/ director Jeremy Lalonde tells us all about it.
culturalmining.com 
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