Your choices are mixed this week, ranging from very good to considerably lower. But watch out for these unusual new entries. Two popular films are back in extended versions. (Actually I don’t think they ever really left. They were that popular the first time around).
Spider-Man: Far From Home, which arrived early in July, now has seven minutes of new footage. No details on what they show, but there have been hints of a new four-minute action sequence. What else? Marine Gateway and four suburban theatres will show the answer.
At the same time Midsommar that surprise hit about students visiting a colony of pagans in Sweden now has 24 extra minutes. This is the version the director originally submitted but was told to trim. We know more about it because the Indie Wire website has a detailed shotlist of what’s been put back in. It does seem to improve some things, including the suddeness of the extreme ending. It could be good; the original was. But at now almost three hours long? It’s at Scotiabank and in Langley.
These are also now playing:
Brittany Runs a Marathon: 3 stars
Tigers are Not Afraid: 4
Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles: 3 ½
Toxic Beauty: 4
Road to the Lemon Grove: 2
BRITTANY RUNS A MARATHON: Young women obsessing about their weight will totally get this and Jillian Bell makes it funny believable without overdoing it. She’s played memorable secondary characters in films and TV for years and gets a welcome centre spot here. It’s natural in a way; her character is a staple of American comedies, “the fat sidekick” as the writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo said it in an interview. She gets off some good lines but we never get her story. Here we do. (Colaizzo, who is principally a playwright, based the story on a friend of his).
Bell fits perfectly. She’s perky but insecure about being chubby and wants desperately to be thinner. It takes a doctor’s cautionary warning to motivate her and, unwilling to pay those high gym fees, she takes up jogging. She’s timid about it though, especially since a hard-jogging neighbor (Michaela Watkins) seems to be condescending to her. She’s not; she’s just one of those gung ho types and eventually becomes a running partner. The film shows Brittany slowly coming to understand and accept who she is. She’s working towards the New York City Marathon and in a side story takes an extra job as a house sitter. There she meets a brash, sharp-witted guy (Utkarsh Ambudkar) who claims to be the night-time house sitter and in a series of amusing interchanges further challenges her to work on her self-esteem. They become lovers; she keeps on training and this comedy works as light entertainment with some serious concerns imbedded within. (5th Avenue, Park & Tilford) 3 out of 5
TIGERS ARE NOT AFRAID: Guillermo del Toro led the way; Issa López has followed and with almost matching success. The Mexican writer-director has seamlessly combined creepy thrills, street-level action and outright fantasy in a story of children trying to survive. Their parents are dead, victims of the drug wars that have been raging in Mexico for over a decade. They live in abandoned buildings and steal for food. They stick together and know the world outside their group is corrupt. They’ve been forced to grow up too fast and resort to imagined visions now and then to be able to carry on. That’s the world López has created in this brisk 83-minute film. In its best moments it is very moving.
Two of these kids drive the story. Estrella wishes to see her mother again and does in ghostly (or bloody) emanations. El Shine is the leader of the pack, full of rage and power and soon in possession of a gun and a phone that he stole from a drunken drug dealer. The guy wants them back; the guy’s boss is most anxious about the phone because, as we learn later, there’s something on there. So the film spins this complex story that mixes violent criminals and street children against a backdrop of a collapsing society, political cowardice, cops not doing their job. The child actors are excellent.
Magical realist elements, mostly effective, add a fairy tale atmosphere and reinforce the central idea: they’re children. Look what’s happened to them. (VanCity Theatre) 4 out of 5
FIDDLER: A MIRACLE OF MIRACLES: Well sure. Fiddler on the Roof’s success surprised a lot of people. A Detroit critic called it “bad.” Walter Kerr in New York declared it a “near miss”. People lined up though and made it one of the most successful Broadway musicals ever. This documentary by Max Lewkowicz is a snappy, breezy telling of the whole story some of which is new to me. The title, for instance, is based on a Marc Chagall painting, not the original stories by Sholem Aleichem. The bottle dance was based on a single sighting at a Jewish wedding. The show has been just as popular in countries as diverse as Japan and Thailand. Lin Manuel Miranda performed in it in grade three and staged an entire song and dance number at his own wedding.
There are memories from people who helped create it, performers over the years, observers and critics. Tradition, they acknowledge is the main appeal, but also look at the contemporary concerns like women’s lib, civil rights, and parental control that are in it. The pogrom in the show is ethnic cleansing; displaced people are refugees. For the film version, Norman Jewison didn’t hire Zero Mostel to repeat as Tevye, but Topol who he thought had more of an Israeli energy about him, a better fit in that time of war. We get the show’s history, backstage gossip, clips from many productions, including one at Stratford in Ontario, and a good understanding of its cross-cultural appeal. It’s not just about a milkman and his daughters. (5th Avenue) 3 ½ out of 5
TOXIC BEAUTY: The VanCity Theatre has brought back this unsettling film from DOXA (and Hot Docs, I guess) for two screenings that should interest you if you use face cream, shaving lotion, and any of the many personal care products in your medicine chest. It alerts you to dangers in some of them. Talcum powder is the most examined here because it is, as one scientist says, a “delivery device” for several carcinogens. Johnson and Johnson is facing thousands of lawsuits over it. In one cited here, a woman with cervical cancer won her case but no damages. Still, that means J&J lost. (They just lost a big one over opioids too, but that’s another story.)
Some scientists have been warning for years about commercial beauty products. Some of them are hormone disruptors, possibly because of preservatives added to them. You’ll get to know a lot about parabens and phthalates and whether alternates are any better. The film is densely packed with information, sometimes flickering by too fast to read it all. But it is worrying, and should be. The EU has banned far more of these chemicals than Canada, and we’ve banned far more than the US. The film by Phyllis Ellis of Toronto isn’t alarmist but it is a strong alert. It screens Sunday and Thursday.
Sunday’s will be followed by a discussion that includes Ellis, the director, JoAnn Fowler, of Vancouver, a longtime make-up artist who has developed a line of “clean” cosmetics and Prof. Bruce Lanphear, of SFU, who warns about toxic chemicals and our health. (4 out of 5 stars)
ROAD TO THE LEMON GROVE: Last year about this time we got a Canadian film called Liitle Italy that I didn’t like at all. It was full of excitable Italian stereotypes and not much purpose. This year, we have this one with considerable purpose but not succeeding much better. There are excitable Italians here too, imagined by the Hamilton, Ont. story teller Charly Chiarelli, in a script he who wrote with the director, Dale Hildebrand. He expounds a worthwhile message about retaining your cultural heritage and recognizing that language is the key element of that. Unfortunately it takes a long time before the film makes it clear that that is its purpose. Before that we get more loud, broad humor.
Chiarelli plays two roles, a father and his son. The old man has died but appears to the son now and then because he’s stuck in limbo waiting for a plan he’s activated to play out. Two sides of the family claim a lemon grove in Sicily. The son is to go there and secure it for their side, while Burt Young (you know him as Paulie in the Rocky films) heads the scheming other side at what looks like a perpetual family dinner. One of his clan also makes the trip letting on that he’s a Mafioso. The son meanwhile meets a glamorous movie star, played by ballet dancer Rossella Brescia, and she’s a sometime ally. As a plot it strains and one device makes it even harder to connect to. The son is a professor of linguistics and sends back lectures to his students –and to us—in cell phone videos and voiceovers that explain the themes of the film. Way too obvious. (International Village and Riverport) 2 out of 5