August usually ends with the dreg films. Not this time. We get two that are intelligent and highly entertaining. You can also trek into the Canadian wilderness and B.C. mountains, watch a fictional coup in Asia and a cross-cultural almost-romance in New York.
Or note that the VanCity Theatre has brought back Violent, a B.C. film that some say should be Canada’s official entry into the foreign language category at the Academy Awards. It was made in Norway in that country’s language. I wonder how Quebec filmmakers would react but it has won a lot already, including best B.C. film at VIFF, at the Leo Awards and from Vancouver’s critics. I gave it three stars back in January.
Here are the new films …
The End of the Tour: 4½ stars
Mistress America: 4
No Escape: 3
Backcountry: 3½
Mountain Men: 3½
Learning to Drive: 2½
We Are Your Friends: 2½
THE END OF THE TOUR: An intelligent film about writers, talking and talking. Sounding each other out. Challenging. Driving and talking some more. Sounds dull? It is anything but. It’s bristling with ideas, tension, drama even and good doses of reality. It’s the best depiction I’ve seen of the relationship that develops between a reporter and a personality he’s interviewing to write a profile. Also well depicted is the routine of promoting books involving tours, readings and personal appearances.
But the big surprise is Jason Segel playing a straight dramatic role. He’s usually a comedian. You saw a lot of him in Forgetting Sarah Marshall which he also wrote. Here he plays David Foster Wallace, the author of the epic novel, Infinite Jest. The book had just come out; he was being lionized by the critics and had to emerge from the loner life he preferred. Jesse Eisenberg plays the Rolling Stone writer who spends five days with him and carries on a conversation that starts in his home and continues during several car drives to publicity events, in cafes, the garish Mall of America, even in a movie theatre. The subjects cover almost as much as the novel, although not Quebec separatism.
“Why do we feel so empty and unhappy?” is a major theme for Wallace, who 12 years later committed suicide. The film doesn’t answer why but does give us a vital mind speaking out, ingratiating most of the time, prickly and critical at others and quick to take offence in a scene with a stunning tonal shift. “I treasure my regular guyness,” he says at one point. It’s an astonishing portrait based on taped conversations which Rolling Stone never did publish but the reporter turned into a book. Jason Segal has to get an Oscar nomination for his performance. (Fifth Avenue Cinemas) 4 ½ out of 5
MISTRESS AMERICA: One of the funniest films you’ll see this year is also one of the best written and acted. This is what Woody Allen used to be good at. Noah Baumbach is in the chair for this one and his girlfriend Greta Gerwig helped write it and stars. They previously made the also-funny Frances Ha together.
Greta plays an impetuous New Yorker who’s got a constant flow of ideas but has trouble sticking with any one long enough to make it happen. The film’s title is from a TV series she’s thought up but not written. She’s an auto-didact, she says, and “a beacon of hope for lesser people.” We meet her through one of those. Her step-sister-to-be (Lola Kirke) is a student new in town, somewhat timid, a would-be writer but snubbed by the campus literary set. She’s drawn into the flibbertigibbet’s sphere by the confidence of her chatter and the audacity of her plans. The latest is a combination restaurant, hair salon and art gallery. She needs money to start it, though, and figures her ex- and the woman who stole both him and a T-shirt idea from her could provide it. The dialogue when they meet, and through the whole film for that matter, is fast and clever. Obsessive narcissism is rarely this enjoyable. (Fifth Avenue Theatre) 4 out of 5
NO ESCAPE: This is a rarity: a film about imperialism. It doesn’t use the word but that’s the import of a speech Pierce Brosnan’s character delivers to Owen Wilson’s. Guys like him, he explains, pave the way for companies like his to sell third-world countries more than they can afford and use that debt to enslave them. Strong stuff for a film that’s basically an action adventure about an American family chased by murderous rebels. They’re angry that an American company has bought their water system and will run it for profit. Documentaries have talked about cases like that in Latin America. This is in an Asian country, not identified but said to share a border with Vietnam.
Wilson has brought his family there (wife Lake Bell and two children) to work for the water company. After the head of state is assassinated the mob runs through the streets and the halls of the hotel to hunt down any foreigners. American paranoia made visual. We haven’t seen chaos in the streets this scary and depicted this well since Children of Men a few years ago. The tension builds nicely as one peril after another appears but eventually gets wearying. Once the chase starts, which is very soon, that’s all there is. They try to get to the American embassy (on the advice of Brosnan, who returns after wandering off for much of the film) or to Vietnam across the river. It’s gripping and often bloody, possibly thanks to the horror movie background of the director, John Erick Dowdle. Wilson does well, ditching his comic irony to be an everyman running with his family. (Dunbar, International Village and suburban theatres) 3 out of 5
BACKCOUNTRY: Who doesn’t like a good scary movie now and then? This one is a real chiller that plays on fears most of us can feel. It’s very Canadian and the director, Adam MacDonald, subtly and deliberately ramps up the unease, throws nature’s bloody violence at us and finds an unlikely hero.
Missy Peregrym and Jeff Roop play a couple going on a camping trip in Ontario’s Algonquin Park. He’s retracing a trip from his childhood and intends to propose when they get to Blackfoot Trail. Things go wrong, of course, in this apparently true story. The trail is closed for the season. Jeff intends to go anyway. He refuses to take a map because he knows the park, you see. A visit along the way by a dodgy guy claiming to be a wilderness guide is unsettling. That night at the campfire they’re like the ancients huddling against the dangers out there in the dark. Are those bear noises they hear? Worse, next day Jeff gets them lost, wanders right into bear neighbourhood and suffers for it. Missy, the city woman, has to dig inside herself for strength she hasn’t used before. This is a film with good acting and strong menacing atmosphere. (International Village and two suburban theatres) 3½ out of 5
MOUNTAIN MEN: After their horrible first film together (Control, Alt, Delete, 2010) the Labine brothers have made a smart one. Cameron directed this study of family dynamics centering on, naturally, two brothers. One (Tyler Labine) is a likable shlub living a slacker life in Revelstoke, where he deals a little weed and has just got his girlfriend pregnant. The other (Chace Crawford best known from TV’s Gossip Girl) has moved on to a big-city career and is back home for their mother’s wedding. Dad went missing years before.
They head out to a family cabin but accidentally burn it down and destroy their car. The film becomes a survival epic in beautiful B.C. mountains. They have to hike through deep snow, avoid cliffs, set a broken leg and improvise shelter. All the while they argue, as brothers are wont to do, tell old secrets and blow big holes into each other’s perceptions of themselves. Mostly they talk about what makes a real man. The city brother reveals he has problems which he blames on what he calls a bad-luck gene in the family. The local brother finds a take-charge side within himself. The film nicely alternates between comic and poignant and the interplay between the two actors, the bulk of the film actually, really feels like brothers who’ve gone separate ways but are cautiously bonding again.(VanCity Theatre) 3½ out of 5
LEARNING TO DRIVE: Seven years ago Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson were here in Vancouver with director Isabel Coixet making the film Elegy. They had so much fun they wanted to work together again. Well here is the result. It’s light, not gloomy like their first effort, but it has other problems.
Clarkson plays a New York book critic, ditched by her husband and vaguely attracted to a Sikh cabdriver played by Kingsley. He has a second car to give driving lessons which Clarkson takes. Along with how to handle a car she learns self-reliance and the courage to take charge of her life. When she compares cultural notes with Kingsley she can’t understand why he is about to marry a woman newly brought over from India whom he’d never met before. His answer: “Yes, you are better off. That’s why you are alone and crazy.” Sadly most of the film isn’t that clever. It’s standard stuff, dull at times and marred by several scenes that don’t fit the tone at all. Originally a New Yorker article, the material seems to have been worked over way too much, ethnicities changed (Filipino to Sikh) and issues raised but too little explored (he’s a former political prisoner). Some nice colourful scenes in the temple, though. Curiously it was the runner-up audience favorite at the Toronto Film Festival last year. (Fifth Avenue Theatre) 2½ out of 5
WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS: Warner Brothers has had a bad summer and I don’t expect this will help too much. It tries to bring the excitement of Electronic Dance Music to be big screen, like Saturday Night Fever did for disco. It even tells a similar story — young guy (Zac Efron) does boring work daytime; tries to make it as a DJ nighttime — but the seen-it-all before story is so trite it dulls down the beats. They should be, as he explains in a DJ primer, 128 BPM’s (beats per minute). At that point he’s got control of the entire circulatory system of every dancer out on the floor. The film hits that mark only a few times.
In between raves and club gigs, Zac spends time with his suburban buddies, an Entourage-like collective who work as home-renovators and then as telemarketers for a shady real estate vulture. He’s also mentored by a formerly influential DJ (Wes Bentley) who is content these days to just give the people what they want but can still extol listening to the real world and building your own track. Zac does all that but also sleeps with the guy’s girlfriend (Emily Ratajkowski ) — the lit-up Las Vegas Eiffel tower makes an amusing phallic symbol— and at his day job develops a conscience. Those pieces of story don’t gel. They detract from the good parts, the work on laptops, in the clubs and in a studio creating the music that’s so hot right now. The French film Eden, which played here last month, does a better job portraying the scene. (Scotiabank and many suburban theatres) 2½ out of 5