Advertisement

Movies & TV

Film Friday: Safety Not Guaranteed, The Woman in the Fifth, Rock of Ages and more

i am a good person /i am a bad person (Ingrid Veninger) finds shoestring writer/director/producer Veninger once again doing a lot with a little. She casts herself as a Toronto filmmaker who takes her new movie to festivals in England and Germany, bringing her teenage daughter (Hallie Switzer, Veninger’s actual daughter) along as her assistant. But each woman is dealing with her own issues, and when the daughter forsakes Berlin for a solo jaunt to Paris, they find themselves emotionally adrift. Veninger’s trademark emotional minimalism is balanced by a streak of self-aware wit, mostly directed at Veninger’s own character. 82 min.

Rating: NNNN (NW)

Opens Jun 15 at the Royal. See here for times.


The Island President (Jon Shenk) is a fascinating look at an extraordinary personality: Maldives (former) president Mohamed Nasheed, who’s trying to slow global warming and arrest the rising water levels that will soon swallow his country. A former political prisoner who fought his country’s long-standing dictatorship and spent years in exile, Nasheed returned to become the nation’s first democratically elected president. Shenk gains impressive access, and Nasheed’s backroom wheeling and dealing during the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit is thrilling. Surprisingly, it takes a tremendous amount of effort to get politicians to agree to save the world. Yet such one-sided collaboration with the subject makes you wonder whether some footage was doctored Michael Moore-style – not that it’s hard to take a side when it comes to the environment. Some subtitles. 101 min.

Rating: NNN (RS)

Opens Jun 15 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


Lola Versus (Daryl Wein) is the hipster answer to rom-coms and other conventional depictions of young women exploring New York City’s social scene. Call it Sex And The East Village. Indie poster girl Greta Gerwig stars as Lola, a 29-year-old grad student who’s dumped by her fiancé and must navigate rebounds and other awkward late-night fumbles. By turns trite and honest, the film is a pleasurable distraction but remains as thin and flimsy as Lola’s malleable self-respect. Zoe Lister-Jones and co-writer/director Wein engineer their screenplay for the talented and charming Gerwig. While her sweet-natured, emotionally damaged floozy is likeable, neither she nor the film will be remembered the morning after. 86 min.

Rating: NNN (RS)

Opens Jun 15 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (Matthew Akers) profiles Serbian performance art star Abramovic. During her 2010 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, in which nude dancers re-enacted her earlier performances, she sat in the museum’s atrium silently staring at the puzzled, bemused or tearful audience members who queued up to sit opposite her. Uncertainty over whether she’ll make it through the arduous months of focusing adds suspense, but at almost two hours, the film itself is a bit of an endurance test. Whether you consider Abramovic’s oeuvre a moving art/theatre hybrid, a shamanic bridge to sacred space or a bunch of S/M stunts re-contextualized as art, you have to admire the inclusive spirit of this performance. 105 min.

Rating: NNN (Fran Schechter)

Opens Jun 15 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. See here for times.


Safety Not Guaranteed (Colin Trevorrow) can’t really compete with the headier, more thoughtful lo-fi sci-fi of Another Earth and Sound Of My Voice. But as a hipster rom-com about people trying to shake off their pasts to make present-day connections, it’s a pretty satisfying tale about a trio of journalists (Jake Johnson, Aubrey Plaza, Karan Soni) on the trail of an eccentric physicist (Mark Duplass, of The League and Your Sister’s Sister) who claims he’s building a time machine. Everyone in the movie is chasing something they’ve lost, and Plaza and Duplass find real chemistry in their little hesitations and averted glances. The gentle growth of their relationship is pushed aside by an ending that overreaches badly, but it’s nice while it lasts. 94 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Jun 15 at Varsity. See here for times.


The Woman in the Fifth (Pawel Pawlikowski) is an oblique, sensual study of an American writer (Ethan Hawke) who comes to Paris to visit his daughter and ex-wife and winds up penniless, living in a flophouse hotel and working as a security guard. Eventually, he meets a mysterious woman (Kristin Scott Thomas) who takes him into her bed for enigmatic reasons. Working from a novel by Douglas Kennedy, Pawlikowski’s far more interested in mood than plot The Woman In The Fifth is a tonal study in much the same way as Polanski’s The Tenant and Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, using elliptical editing and abstracted dialogue to evoke a sense that things are drifting further and further beyond the protagonist’s control and comprehension. It can be a little frustratin, but Hawke’s sympathetic performance creates an emotional continuity that seems to make sense of things even when things don’t make sense at all. Some subtitles. 83 min.

Rating: NNN (NW)

Opens Jun 15 at Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


Foreverland (Max McGuire) is a road movie about Will, a young man (Max Thieriot) with cystic fibrosis who confronts his own mortality on a redemptive drive from BC to Mexico. Director and co-writer McGuire also has cystic fibrosis, and it’s admirable that he uses CF as one element of his protagonist’s character rather than defining him entirely by the condition. But Foreverland falls down on so many other levels that I can’t recommend it: McGuire and screenwriter Shawn Riopelle lean heavily on dramatic clichés like Will’s jokey relationship with an empathetic funeral director (Matt Frewer). And Will’s bright-eyed love interest (Laurence Leboeuf) is introduced so clumsily I spent an hour thinking she was the his dead friend’s girlfriend. 93 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Jun 15 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


Kivalina vs. Exxon (Ben Addelman) tells an important story about small-town resistance to big-business polluters, but it never really finds its focus. When climate change destroys a way of life for the 400 Inupiat Eskimos of Kivalina, Alaska, local activists take the corporations responsible for emitting greenhouse gases to court – including Exxon, Chevron and Shell. All they ask for is funds to relocate the village. Not sure, given the title, why there’s so little about the case, still not settled, and even less about the villagers’ fascinating law team, which defended Philip Morris in its famous tobacco suit. And there should be more about the village activists’ struggle with Alaskans who are thrilled that corporations are giving them jobs. It does, however, have a shit-kicking activist as its centrepiece. Colleen Swan is riveting. Too bad the same can’t be said of the movie. 82 min.

Rating: NN (SGC)

Opens Jun 15 at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. See here for times.


Rock of Ages (Adam Shankman) Rock Of Ages (Adam Shankman) occasionally shows flashes of the funny, frisky and decidedly self-aware jukebox musical put on by a bunch of friends in a Los Angeles theatre back in 2005. But now it’s a great big expensive Hollywood musical, so we’re supposed to take it halfway seriously – which drains out all the fun. Director Shankman, who seemed to know what he was doing with the Hairspray movie, fumbles the project in the first five minutes and never manages to fully right the ship. The gleeful, goofy heart of Chris D’Arienzo’s original book can be glimpsed in the scenes between grizzled club owner Alec Baldwin and helper monkey Russell Brand, and Malin Ackerman gives a spectacular comic performance as a Rolling Stone reporter who succumbs to Tom Cruise’s aging sex cowboy. But they’re operating independently of the rest of the machine. 122 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Jun 15 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Docks Lakeview Drive-In, Eglinton Town Centre, Empire Theatres at Empress Walk, Grande – Steeles, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Varsity, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


388 Arletta Ave (Randall Cole) takes the tightening paranoia of Michael Haneke’s Caché and reimagines it as a Saw movie, with a Toronto ad man (Nick Stahl) harassed by an unknown tormentor. Writer/director Cole’s conceit is that the entire story is told through surveillance video, and he has an impressive technical facility, but as in his previous picture, Real Time, he hangs everything on his gimmick. Stahl is appropriately sweaty and tense, but the movie doesn’t really care about his character’s desperate attempts to figure out why he’s being made to suffer the suffering is all that matters. 86 min.

Rating: NN (NW)

Opens Jun 15 at Carlton Cinema. See here for times.


That’s My Boy (Sean Anders) has Adam Sandler reiterating the same man-child routine he’s been doing since Billy Madison in 1995. Both Sandler and his shtick have gotten old. Sandler’s Donny is a forty-year-old washout who was once famous for getting his teacher pregnant when he was a teen. That estranged child, Todd (Andy Samberg), has since grown up to disavow his father’s existence, until dad crashes his wedding weekend in need of some cash. Cue the barrage of generic toilet (and jizz) humour, fat people jokes and unwarranted cameos (Vanilla Ice???). The movie hits you with so many stupid, juvenile gags that you eventually succumb to its level and find mild amusement at mundane sights like Sandler jerking off. This must be a metaphor of some sort since we’re often paying to see Sandler pleasure only himself in his movies. Sandler’s not bad at what he does. He’s just not doing much else. 116 min.

Opens Jun 15 at 401 & Morningside, Beach Cinemas, Carlton Cinema, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Courtney Park 16, Eglinton Town Centre, Grande – Steeles, Grande – Yonge, Queensway, Rainbow Market Square, Rainbow Promenade, Rainbow Woodbine, SilverCity Fairview, SilverCity Mississauga, SilverCity Yonge, SilverCity Yorkdale, Yonge & Dundas 24. See here for times.


WWE No Way Out is a live WWE match in high-def.

Opens Jun 17 at Coliseum Mississauga, Coliseum Scarborough, Colossus, Eglinton Town Centre, Queensway, Scotiabank Theatre. See here for times.

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted