Canadian Film Review: Hard Core Logo (1996)

* * * 1/2
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie

It's a sad truth about the Canadian film industry that, unless you're in Toronto or Quebec, it's incredibly difficult for Canadian viewers to get hold of Canadian films. I don't just mean during their theatrical runs (though it is rare, at least where I live, for a Canadian film to play in any of the local theaters), but on video as well (even before all the video stores started shutting down). In that kind of climate, it's a minor miracle when a Canadian film ends up being as widely seen as Bruce McDonald's Hard Core Logo, which has attained status as a Canadian classic (voted in multiple polls as one of the best Canadian films ever made) and a cult following outside of Canada. It's easy to understand why, too. A mockumentary about the ill-fated reunion of the titular punk band, Hard Core Logo is an incredibly entertaining film and Canadian to its core.

Canadian Film Review: Trigger (2010)

* * * *
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Tracy Wright, Molly Parker

Friendships can be complicated things and the longer they last, the more complicated they get. Bruce McDonald's film Trigger is about a decades long friendship picking up after a long period of estrangement. Its two protagonists fight and make up, open some wounds and heal others. Though the scope of the film is very small, it is such a well executed and engaging piece of work that it makes a big impact.

Canadian Film Review: This Movie Is Broken (2010)

* * *
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Greg Calderone, Georgia Reilly

This may come as a shock, but I see a lot of movies. As such, it's not very often that movies surprise me, at least in terms of plot movements. The last 5 or 10 minutes of This Movie Is Broken really caught me off guard - I totally did not see that coming. Well done, Bruce McDonald.

This Movie Is Broken is made up of two parts. One is an unrequited love story between Bruno (Greg Calderone) and Caroline (Georgina Reilly), the girl of his dreams who, even when she's within reach, still always remains somehow just out of reach. The other part is a concert film of Broken Social Scene, the Toronto band with the massive membership roster that includes Leslie Feist, Kevin Drew, and Metric's Emily Haines and James Shaw, amongst many others.

The film begins with Bruno and Caroline waking up together. He's elated because, as he explains, if he's waking up with her this morning, that means he went to bed with her last night. This happiness, however, is bittersweet because Caroline is only in town for one more day and then will be going off to Paris, so Bruno needs to make the most of what little time he has left with her. Knowing that she's a big Broken Social Scene fan, Bruno tells her he has backstage passes to their concert (a lie, but his buddy has a plan to work around that). Things are going great for a while but, unfortunately, before the concert is over Bruno finds that his ideas about the relationship and hers are very much in conflict.

Written by Don McKellar (McDonald and Drew get "based on an idea by" credits), the film has a nice sense of flow and manages to convey a lot about Bruno and Caroline's relationship in a very succinct way. The direction that they're heading in is pretty effectively foreshadowed in the opening minutes when Bruno is floating so high on cloud nine that he can't really recognize all the subtle ways that Caroline is already starting to hold him at arm's length. He's investing a lot more into this than she is and when he's finally confronted with that fact it leads to a lot of anger and hurt and frustration on both sides. The way that the relationship is set up and unfolds actually reminded me quite a bit of (500) Days of Summer in that both are about guys who want someone so badly that they're blind to the signs that their feelings aren't quite reciprocated or, at least, not to the degree that they'd like.

McDonald has made a number of films that center on musicians so it should come as no surprise that This Movie Is Broken is quite adept at merging the romantic storyline with the concert footage. Interestingly, rather than using the music to punctuate the romantic storyline, the romantic storyline is constructed in such a way that it underscores the music. The scenes between Bruno and Caroline are used to accentuate the mood and theme of any given song and this turns out to be a very clever narrative strategy because, of course, a song can tell a story in a very short amount of time and thus we get a fair bit of progression and insight into the relationship in a fairly brief amount of time just through the music.

Your enjoyment of This Movie Is Broken will likely depend on your familiarity with and enjoyment of Broken Social Scene. Personally, I'm not terrifically familiar with the band itself, but I am a fan of many of its individual members, so I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. The story around the music is solid and, as I said at the top, big surprise at the end. Check it out.

Canadian Film Review: Highway 61 (1991)

* * *
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Don McKellar, Valerie Buhagiar, Earl Pastko

Take a corpse, a road trip, and the devil, mix in some missing drugs and an opposites attract romance, and you’ll get Bruce McDonald’s Highway 61. A dark comedy full of oddball characters and strange scenes, this is a film that can’t really be compared to any other because it goes so far off the beaten track and is totally doing it’s own thing.

The film begins in a small town near Thunder Bay with naïve and somewhat sheltered barber Pokey Jones (Don McKellar) finding a frozen body in his backyard. Jackie Bangs (Valerie Buhagiar) comes to claim the body, stating that he’s her brother. In reality she wants to use the body to smuggle drugs into the US and she talks Pokey into driving her and the body down Highway 61 to New Orleans. Pokey is excited by the prospect, having never been anywhere or done anything. He’s also intrigued by Jackie, who works as a roadie, and tells her about his own aspirations to be a jazz musician.

During the course of their journey they have several small adventures, the strangest of which involves a visit to some friends of Jackie’s that degenerates into a shooting spree. The how and why of that I’ll leave for you to discover for yourself. Running a close second in terms of strange encounters is their meetings with the Watson family, a father and three daughters who tour around the south in a motor home. Abandoned by Mrs. Watson, Mr. Watson is determined to make his daughters stars – a loosing battle if ever there was one. This encounter also ends with shooting, which would suggest that the problem isn’t other people as much as it is Pokey and Jackie.

Running parallel to their journey is that of Mr. Skin (Earl Pastko), who may or may not be Satan. He’s on their trail because he has a claim of his own on the corpse, namely that the man had sold him his soul before dying. He collects more souls (or, rather, the promise of souls) on the way to New Orleans and his return to his hometown culminates in a bizarre, but entirely fitting, climax.

This is an odd film, but not odd in a “look at me I’m so alternative” kind of way. Rather it is odd in a way that seems natural and without pretence. It is conventional to a point, at least in terms of road movie customs, but it turns everything on its head with its dark, satirical sensibilities. At one point Mr. Skin encounters one of the Watson girls, who informs him of her father’s promise that her mother is coming back, that she and her sisters will be stars, and that she’ll grow up to be beautiful and marry someone famous. “I’m not sure who, exactly.” Mr. Skin replies by stating: “You’re going to be an ugly lady. You’ll probably be fat and work as a cashier and no one is going to want to marry you. You see, parents aren’t allowed to tell the truth about certain things.” He then tells her that if she really wants to become famous, all she has to do is sign her name on a piece of paper he’ll give her. She’s not the first person to sign her soul away for a chance at stardom and she certainly won't be the last.

As far as the acting goes, McKellar and Buhagiar are well cast, playing characters who are strange in their own ways but also more sane and grounded than all the others in the film. McKellar plays Pokey as book smart but woefully lacking in street smarts, so vulnerable to Jackie’s charms that you still want to protect him from her even after you’ve realized that beneath her hard exterior, there’s a softie with a good heart. The show is stolen of course by Pastko in a supremely creepy, and yet also kind of funny, performance. Whether he actually is Satan or just a guy with a bunch of names signed on pieces of paper is always in question and the revelation at the end is ultimately very satisfying. Though this isn’t the kind of movie that will appeal to everyone, it is nevertheless very good and a solid piece of entertainment.

Canadian Film Review: Pontypool (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly, Hrant Alianak

Pontypool takes a page out of the Jaws handbook, providing a vague, mostly unseen danger to our heroes that looms all the larger for its near total absence from the screen. If you’ve seen Jaws, you know how awesomely effective that method of storytelling is. What we see might be scary but it will never be as scary as what we can’t see and so it is with Pontypool which finds a radio show host and his two producers being bombarded with stories of strange and violent behaviour on the other side of town and knowing that this undefined threat is moving closer and closer to them.

The film takes place over the course of a few hours on a snowy, dreary day in Pontypool, Ontario. Radio show host Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) has a strange encounter on the road, which leaves him shaken up and which he decides to discuss with his listeners. The discussion is cut short, however, when word starts to come in about a demonstration of some kind outside the office of a Dr. Mendez (Hrant Alianak). While Grant editorializes regarding the scant amount of information they have about the unfolding event, his producers Sydney (Lisa Houle) and Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) try to find some kind of official corroboration for the eye witness accounts. Though there is no official confirmation from the police about what is happening, people continue to call in to discuss the increasingly violent and disturbing events outside of Dr. Mendez’s office.

As the day progresses, the death toll mounts, and words like "cannibals" start getting tossed around, Grant starts to lose it, believing that this is all part of some big hoax being perpetrated on him. It isn't until the appearance of Dr. Mendez himself at the radio station (which is actually just a church basement), that the reality of the situation starts to sink in. There is a virus of sorts going around, he explains, one that isn't passed through the blood but through the English language itself. This presents something of a dilema for the radio team, who wonder how they can explain the situation and warn people if the language is infected and are also forced to question their own culpability in spreading the virus through their medium.

Save for a few moments, the film takes place entirely in the church basement and much of it takes place in the sound booth itself after Dr. Mendez reveals that the afflicted hunt with their ears not their eyes. Safely (for the time being) locked up in the soundproof booth, Grant and his crew have to figure out what they're going to do to save themselves and how they might cure those who have the virus, but haven't reached the fatal stage yet (those who have the virus and don't find a victim to pass it on to kind of... explode). This minimalist approach makes the film all the more effective because the tension rises as the safe space becomes smaller and smaller. The fact that we don't actually start to see the effects of the virus until about 2/3rds of the way into the film is also quite effective and credit for that goes to the actors, who so successfully convey and transfer their growing sense of terror to the audience. There isn't a lot of gore in this movie (a little but not much) but it's about a hundred times scarrier than most movies that dispense with buckets of blood from openning to end credits. The terror is psychological and that can be pretty hard to shake off.

It's difficult not to read a political meaning into this film when its protagonist is a radio show host who prides himself on "telling it like it is," language is the enemy, and one of the characters is a soldier recently returned from Afghanistan. One of the symptoms of the virus is repeating a word ad nauseum which, if you've ever watched certain news shows, you know that simply repeating "talking points" in an increasingly loud voice is what passes for political analysis these days. Pontypool isn't aggressively political but this criticism of the way that language is being abused is definitely there.

Bruce McDonald, who directed last year's "love it or hate it" The Tracey Fragments, keeps the film really lean stylistically speaking. The simplicity of his style here adds immensely to the growing feeling of claustrophobia that the screenplay and the actors work so hard at creating. Pontypool is apparently the first film in a planned trilogy from McDonald - I'm not really sure how that will work given how this one ends, but I'll definitely be looking out for the next installment.

Canadian Film Review: The Tracy Fragments (2007)

* * * 1/2
Director: Bruce McDonald
Starring: Ellen Page

By virtue of its design, The Tracey Fragments is perhaps destined to be divisive. This is a challenging film; one that’s not easily accessible or easy to pin down. It isn’t until the last ten or so minutes that the story really begins to gel, at least according to any traditional understanding of narrative. In this sense, it’s a film that is perhaps best seen twice. The first viewing can be a difficult experience, but subsequent viewings tend to be much smoother.

The story (as best as I can piece it together): Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) is a 15-year-old outcast and loner, picked on and humiliated at school, and tortured at home by the toxic atmosphere created by her bickering parents. The only person she seems to connect with in any positive way is her brother, Sonny, a little boy who believes that he’s a dog. After showing up at school in a skimpy outfit, her father grounds her, which doesn’t stop her from going out. Loyal dog that he is, Sonny follows her and they play fetch with a tennis ball. During their game she becomes distracted by the appearance of a boy from school that she likes, who figures into her fantasies as a rock star named Billy Zero. After Billy leaves, Tracey realizes that she’s lost Sonny. Her determination to find him leads her on a mad quest through the city and eventually to the home a drug dealer, where things go from bad to worse and she finds herself sitting on a bus wearing nothing but her underwear and a shower curtain.

There is hardly a moment when the film doesn’t call attention to itself as a film. Only rarely does a shot take up the entire screen; most often the screen is split into four shots, or one big shot with several smaller shots layered over it. These fractured shot compositions underscore the fragility of Tracey's psyche, reflecting her inner pain and confusion. It could easily be argued that the film is a little too conscious of itself, that the style is overbearing to the point of being just a bit precious. Like I said, the first viewing can be difficult and it wasn’t until it was almost over that I really started to move past the style and be involved in the story.

As Tracey, Ellen Page delivers a strong performance, one that manages to stand out where a lesser actress would have found herself steamrolled by the style and structure of the story. This is a brave performance and Page doesn't hold anything back whether Tracey is enduring cruel humiliation or momentary joy. While the success of Juno might find her typecast for a while as the endearingly sarcastic teen, she's capable of a great deal more and I hope that she's able to find roles which truly showcase the extent of her talents.

I don't know that I can say that I "enjoyed" The Tracey Fragments as such, but I certainly admire the abilities of director Bruce McDonald. A story like this one can be difficult to pull off not only because it requires a lot of work on the part of the audience, but also because it's very limiting in terms of how much story can be told. All that you see is what is in Tracey's mind and it takes a great deal of control to keep other perspectives from invading in order to fill in the blanks or bridge one vignette to another. That this movie works and is able to maintain a purity of perspective is no minor accomplishment.