Mortdecai is a terrible movie. Need elaboration? Read my review from January, or check the picture’s scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, or you can ask any of the handful of people who paid to see the damn thing during its brief run. It is bad. No one liked it.
You can’t even enjoy it ironically – but you can damn well try. Otherwise decent and well-meaning folks like Jesse Hawken, John Semley and Will Sloan even attempted to organize a field trip to the last Toronto screening at the Scotiabank, only to discover it had been cancelled without notice. They were upset I like to think this is the way the universe is supposed to work.
But just as John Connor is shocked to discover in Terminator III: Rise Of The Machines, destiny is fixed mere humans cannot prevent the apocalypse, we can merely postpone it. And this Sunday (March 29), anyone who feels like wasting money can have a date with Mortdecai when The Royal screens it at 4 pm.
So, yes. It’s Mortdecai mania, one last time, with Will writing a celebratory essay and Cal MacLean creating a cheeky reissue trailer and a vague sense of irrational hope: maybe, if everyone tries really, really hard, there might be some laughs to be found. (This is the part where I point out that Jesse, John and Will are friends of mine, and seem to be doing this, on some level, just to annoy me.)
I respect the intention, I really do. But I have seen Mortdecai, and I know better. Don’t go. Just don’t. Or go, but just buy some popcorn and then leave the theatre and walk around Little Italy, thinking about how nice the weather’s been lately. Or do literally anything else, and be conscious of the fact that you aren’t seeing Mortdecai. It’s a win-win.
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There are other, slightly more serious cinema events to consider. Saturday (March 28), for instance, there’s the latest MDFF/Seventh Art screening, the Toronto premiere of Jazmin Lopez’s 2012 feature Leones.
A delicate, frequently beautiful experiment about five young friends who go for a lazy wander in the forest, it’s Gus Van Sant’s Gerry without the urgency – or Albert Serra’s Birdsong without the absurdity. And if those references have aroused your interest, by all means go find out what’s what. 8 pm at Camera doors open at 7 pm, admission is $10.
Perhaps less serious is the return of TIFF’s Versus series. TIFF has reconfigured the model for its cinematic smackdowns where the last round pitted two critics against each other for weeks on end – defending the fairly indefensible likes of Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme – Versus 2.0 collapses the entire face-off into a few days, forcing the audience to judge between a different pair of 80s icons.
On Tuesday (March 31), Kiva Reardon stands up for Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing on Thursday (April 2), Anne T. Donahue throws down for Kevin Bacon in Footloose. The cases thus made, the films are screened and the audience votes on which actor delivers more dancing magnetism.
Now, Kiva and Anne are both friends of mine – heck, Anne was on the very first episode of my podcast, Someone Else’s Movie! – so I’m not taking sides on this one. Besides, the winner will be rewarded with an April 3 screening of either Swayze’s Ghost or Bacon’s Flatliners. So just remember: as with Mortdecai, whoever wins, we lose.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
