Canada

I USED TO BE FUNNY: PTSD is no joke

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Photo caption: Rachel Sennott in I USED TO BE FUNNY. Courtesy of Utopia.

In the Canadian indie I Used to Be Funny, Sam is a standup comedian (played by Rachel Sennott, a real life standup comedian). Sam has been suffering the effects of PTSD for a year, and is existing with the kindness of her two comedian roommates. She’s been unable to work, write or leave the house, and it’s a major achievement to take a shower.

Through flashbacks, we learn how she got to her present condition. Sam had taken a day job as a nanny for a 13-year-old girl, Brooke (Olga Petsa). Brooke is a pistol anyway, but her mom is on her deathbed and her father is stricken with both grief and the bewilderment as to how to meet the needs of his teenage daughter, who is already troubled by the mom’s illness and soon to go off the rails completely. At first Brooke responds encouragingly to the hip young Sam. But then, everyone’s life is upended by the traumatic event. (That event is depicted over an hour into the film, but the audience has surely guessed what it is by then. )

Will Sam work through her PTSD and become functional again? Will Brooke be lost to her self-destructiveness?

I Used to Be Funny is the first feature for television writer-director Ally Pankiw. Pankiw accurately portrays the disabling pain of a PTSD sufferer and the helplessness of adults dealing with an out-of-control teenager. Pankiw finally gets us to a redemptive ending, but there’s a lots of emotional pain and drama on the way.

In case you forget that this is a Canadian film, you’ll notice that the comedian roommates, the estranged boyfriend, Brooke’s aunt and the folks at the comedy club are exceedingly nice. Even the troubled teen, a punk drug dealer and sexist cops are very nice for their types.

I watched I Used to Be Funny because I so enjoyed Sennott’s performance in Saturday Night. Now we know that Sennott has the emotional range to play the extremes of the spectrum – a depressive here and a sexy and masterful creative in Saturday Night. Both of those characters are quick-witted, and Sennott is very believable, of course, as a head comedy writer and as a standup comic.

I Used to Be Funny is streaming on Netflix, Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

BLACKBERRY: woulda, coulda, shoulda

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Photo caption: Jay Baruchal in BLACKBERRY. Courtesy of IFC Films.

BlackBerry is the funny true story of Canadian geeks who find themselves suddenly dominating the nascent smartphone market…but not for long. The improbable rise of BlackBerry’s parent company is a tale of the Odd Couple partnership co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchal), who ran the engineering side, and Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton), who managed finance and sales.

Mike Lazaridis solved the technical challenge that had kept cell phones from becoming the email machines that they have been since. As played by Baruchal, Lazaridis is reserved, even shy, supremely confident in all things tech and not all confidant with other humans.

Lazaridis needed a pitchman, and that was the hard charging Balsillie, who, as played by Howerton ranged between hard-charging and abusive. A tech exec I knew in Silicon Valley was described to me as having “too much testosterone” and that’s Howerton’s Balsillie.

Lazaridis’ engineering brilliance, combined with Balsillie’s sheer will and audacity, allowed the company to nimbly pivot through various product cycles. Balsillie’s hubris even began to leak into Lazaridis. But then came an advance in product design that Lazaridis hadn’t anticipated, and Balsillie had cut one too many corners in finance.

I’ve mostly seen Baruchal in much more broadly funny roles (Tropic Thunder, This Is the End). Here, Baruchal successfully carries the leading role with a much more subtle and textured performance. One nice (and slyly underplayed) touch is that when Baruchal’s character transitions from the CEO of a start-up to the CEO of a company with a massive market cap, his haircut transitions, too.

For much of the movie, we see Howerton playing Balsillie as a one-note, hard charger. He refuses to acknowledge any obstacle, until, in a wonderful moment of performance, his face shows when knows he’s finally been had.

BlackBerry was directed by Matt Johnson, who also co-adapted the screenplay and plays one of company co-founders.

Make sure you watch the end credits to see what happened to the real guys.

I screened BlackBerry for the San Luis Obispo Film Festival, where it won the audience award for Best of Fest. BlackBerry opens in theaters tomorrow, and it’s a surefire audience-pleaser.

LUNE: funny, searing, and richly authentic

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Aviva Armour-Ostroff (left) in LUNE, world premiere at Cinequest. Photo credit: Samantha Falco.

The Must See in this year’s Cinequest is the Canadian indie Lune, an astonishingly authentic exploration of bipolar disorder. Miriam and her teen daughter Eliza must navigate the impacts of the mom’s illness. Played by writer and co-director Aviva Armour-Ostroff, Miriam is the most singular movie character I’ve seen recently.

Miriam is her disease but not just her disease. Smart and funny, and devoted to her daughter without smothering her, she would be the Cool Mom if she weren’t always on be edge of mortifying everyone.

But then there is the bipolar disorder. Miriam’s streams of manic speech have the rhythm of poetry. When she becomes totally absorbed in a manic episode, she tries to enlist everyone she knows in wildly impractical schemes, like a spur-of-the-moment trip back to her native South Africa to vote for Nelson Mandela. And it can get inappropriate, as when she invites Eliza’s high school boyfriend to tag along to Africa.

Aviva Armour-Ostroff and Vlad Alexis in LUNE, world premiere at Cinequest. Photo credit: Samantha Falco.

Having survived previous episodes, Eliza is forced to parent her own mom, always beseeching her to take her meds. The illness has led to their being evicted countless times, and Eliza bears the emotional scars. Miriam often makes Eliza cringe, but Eliza knows that it can get even worse. Eliza’s boyfriend, with no reason to expect otherwise, vastly underestimates the consequences of Miriam’s illness.

Armour-Ostroff has made Miriam funny, but not only a subject of comedy, and neither harmless nor a dangerous monster.

Now, this authenticity is not easy to achieve. Having had family members with mental illness, I particularly despise the exploitation of mental illness for entertainment. I am painfully knowledgeable about multiple personality disorder, and I can tell you that it may be unpredictable, but it sure isn’t amusingly entertaining like in The United States of Tara. (The Three Faces of Eve, on the other hand, is acceptable to me.)

Chloe Van Landschoot in LUNE, world premiere at Cinequest. Photo credit: Samantha Falco.

I asked Armour-Ostroff what drew her to the topic of bipolar disorder? She replied “My dad is Miriam. The character of Eliza is based on me.” Wow. There you have it – the key to the authenticity of Lune.

Armour-Ostroff’s performance is riveting. The rest of the cast is excellent, including Chloe Van Landschoot as Eliza and Vlad Alexis as Eliza’s boyfriend.

Lune, which she co-directed with her partner. Arturo Pérez Torres, is the first feature as a director for Armour-Ostroff. The two co-produced 2017’s The Drawer Boy, which Pérez Torres directed. The Drawer Boy can be streamed on Amazon.

I screened Lune for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021 as the Must See of the festival. Lune‘s next stop on the festival tour is RapidLion – the South African International Film Festival. There’s one more night to stream Lune at Cinequest for only $3.99.

THUNDERBIRD: unoriginal and, finally, insipid

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This is a two-second shot in THUNDERBIRD which has nothing much to do with the plot. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the unremarkable Canadian mystery Thunderbird, a city detective visits a backwoods hamlet to unspool a mystery involving damaged young adults from a local tragic family. Thunderbird has the feel of a typical TV whodunit procedural with a trippy supernatural angle slapped on.

If you’ve ever watched a TV or movie drama, you will have already heard every line of dialogue in Thunderbird.  

There’s also an insufferable dose of noble indigenous spiritualism.

I thought I was watching an especially insipid ending, but then was surprised with the real ending, even more insipid.

Cinequest hosted the US premiere of Thunderbird.

Stream of the Week: LOST SOLACE – a psychopath afflicted by empathy

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LOST SOLACE
LOST SOLACE

The Canadian psychological thriller Lost Solace takes a highly original premise and turns it into a pedal-to-the-metal thriller. It’s an astonishingly successful debut for director and co-writer Chris Scheuerman.

Co-writer Andrew Jenkins stars as the psychopath Spence, whose life is devoted to exploiting women, stealing their stuff and emotionally devastating them to boot. Spence is remarkably skilled and seems unstoppable until he unwisely ingests a recreational drug – he starts suffering hallucinatory episodes that are intensely emotional. Here’s the brilliantly original core of Lost Solace – having the occasional fit of feelings and empathy really gets in the way of being a coolly cruel psychopath.

Spence targets the emotionally fragile rich girl Azaria (Melissa Roxburgh). Melissa is burdened both by the care for her violently psychotic brother Jory (Charlie Kerr) and by years of verbal evisceration by her prick of a father, Chuck (Michael Kopsa). Able to peg Spence as a scumbag, Jory offers Spence a share of his inheritance to kill Chuck. It’s a plan hatched by a psychotic – what could possibly go wrong? Add an ambitious physician (Leah Gibson) who is eager to cash in on a cure for psychopathy, and we’re off to the races.

Scheuerman is an economical story-teller who lets the audience connect the dots. Spence doesn’t even speak until well into the movie. But Scheuerman spins a great tale, and as he reveals his characters, we see that Chuck may be every bit as fiendish as Spence and that Betty the doctor, may be just as greedy. There’s plenty that can unravel Spence’s Perfect Crime, and that’s what keeps us on the edges of our seats.

Andrew Jenkins is completely believable as both the supremely confident Spence and, later, as the Spence determined to steel his way through his unexpected confusion. The rest of the cast is exceptional, too, especially Kopsa and Gibson.

Lost Solace was my personal favorite at Cinequest 2016 and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Stream of the Week: VENUS – meeting your kid for the first time while transitioning

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Debargo Sanyal (center) in VENUS

In the appealing Canadian transgender dramedy Venus, Sid (Debargo Sanyal) is at a personal crossroads. Single after things didn’t work out with his closeted boyfriend Daniel (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), Sid has just begun to dress like a woman in public and to take hormones for his transition. Then, he is shocked to learn that he has a 14-year-old son Ralph (Jamie Myers). The boy thinks that having a transgender dad with Indian heritage is very cool and, unbeknownst to his mom, starts spending more and more time with Sid. Sid has to deal with this, along with the reactions of his more traditional Indian parents and a chance meeting with Daniel.

In her first narrative feature, writer-director Eisha Marjara has crafted a funny, touching and genuine story. Venus is successful largely because of Debargo Sanyal’s performance. Eschewing flamboyance, Sanyal’s Sid is a man driven to keep his dignity in the most inescapably awkward situations. It helps that Sanyal is a master of the comic take; Sid’s reactions to his mother’s and Ralph’s intrusiveness are very funny.

I predicted that Venus, at its US premiere at Cinequest, would become one of the most popular indies at the festival; indeed, it won the Cinequest award for best narrative feature. Venus is available for streaming from Amazon and iTunes.

Cinequest: FLIN FLON: A HOCKEY TOWN

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FLIN FLON: A HOCKEY TOWN

Dustin Cohen’s gentle documentary Flin Flon: A Hockey Town, without even a hint of condescension, paints a meticulous and revealing portrait of a remote Canadian hamlet and its beloved junior hockey team.

Flin Flon is a town of five thousand on the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border.  The closest place that most of us have heard of is Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and that’s a six-and-a-half hour drive from Flin Flon.  There’s a mine in Flin Flon and a junior hockey team, and that’s about it.

As the movie opens, the morning radio station announces a high temperature of minus 19.  Proud locals call their home “a great place to raise kids”, which is what locals say about every place that nobody else even wants to visit.  For decades, the residents have bonded with their beloved hockey team, the Bombers.

18-20 year old hockey players come to Flin Flon, live in the homes of local families (“billeting”) and work hard, physical day jobs off-season.  They are here to concentrate on hockey, although only 1-2 from each Bomber team are likely to significantly advance in the sport.   However, over 40 NHL players have been Flin Flon Bombers, including Hall of Famers Bobby Clarke and Reggie Leach.  Writer-director Dustin Cohen grew up in San Jose as a Sharks Fan.  He stumbled on Flin Flon as he researched Canadian hockey.  He needed more than just a small town for his subject, and he chose Flin Flon because of its hockey heritage.

Flin Flon is “the only city in the world named after a science fiction character (Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin in J.E. Preston Muddock’s The Sunless City).  At Bomber games, the fans like to throw moose legs on to the ice.     This could have been one of those documentaries that make us laugh at the quirky subjects.  Or it could have been about unhealthily obsessed sports fans.

Instead, Flin Flon: A Hockey Town is an insightful and sympathetic study of the town and the kids on the team.  Cohen is very observant, and he shows us seemingly mundane details – driving the bus, prepping the ice, cutting wood – that reveal much about the internal lives of the people in the film.

Cohen only lets us directly watch the hockey in snippets.  Most of the time, we see it reflected through the reactions of teammates and the crowd.  The photography (Soren Nielsen, Christine Ng) and the editing (Kathy Gatto) are superb.

The more I think about Flin Flon: A Hockey Town, the more I admire it.  This is a very humane film.

FLIN FLON: A HOCKEY TOWN

Cinequest: VENUS

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Debargo Sanyal (center) in VENUS

In the appealing Canadian transgender dramedy Venus, Sid (Debargo Sanyal) is at a personal crossroads.  Single after things didn’t work out with his closeted boyfriend Daniel (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), Sid has just begun to dress like a woman in public and to take hormones for his transition.  Then, he is shocked to learn that he has a 14-year-old son Ralph (Jamie Myers).  The boy thinks that having a transgender dad with Indian heritage is very cool and, unbeknownst to his mom, starts spending more and more time with Sid.  Sid has to deal with this, along with the reactions of his more traditional Indian parents and a chance meeting with Daniel.

In her first narrative feature, writer-director Eisha Marjara has crafted a funny, touching and genuine story.  Venus is successful largely because of Debargo Sanyal’s performance.  Eschewing flamboyance, Sanyal’s Sid is a man driven to keep his dignity in the most inescapably awkward situations.  It helps that Sanyal is a master of the comic take; Sid’s reactions to his mother’s and Ralph’s intrusiveness are very funny.

Cinequest hosts the US premiere of Venus, and I expect it to become one of the most popular indies at the festival.

Cinequest: LUBA

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Nicole Maroon in LUBA

Exploring the challenges of co-parenting with an addict, the realistic Canadian drama Luba is topped off with a ticking time bomb finish.  Luba (Nicole Maroon) is a struggling single mom whose estranged husband Donnie (Vladimir Jon Cubrt of Hannibal and Designated Survivor) is a crackhead.  Donnie really loves his son, and Luba tries to let her son create some memories with his dad.

Unfortunately, Donnie is helpless to his addiction  At his best, he is manipulative, sponging Luba’s last few discretionary dollars.  At his worst, he is dangerously irresponsible.  Then Donnie decompensates and goes lethally out of control.

In a futile attempt to make ends meet, Luba lives a hamster wheel experience, bouncing between multiple crappy waitress jobs and childcare that she can’t afford.  Her only emotional and babysitting support comes from other busy moms and from Donnie’s sympathetic mother.  Co-star Vladimir Jon Cubrt wrote Luba and completely captures the essence of Luba’s life – she’s trapped without any moment of relief or enrichment for herself.

Luba doesn’t have unrealistic expectations.  She just wants to pay the rent on time, have some adult male companionship, and, being Canadian, play an occasional pickup game of ice hockey.  Cubrt’s screenplay vividly brings alive another fundamental truth – the grinding impact of living with an addict’s roller coaster of self-sabotage.   Luba’s attempts at moments of normality keep getting hijacked by Donnie’s selfishness.  Repeatedly, respite suddenly turns into panic.  This is Cubrt’s first screenplay, but he has written three original stage productions for the theater company he founded in Toronto.

Luba is the first feature for director Caley Wilson.  This an authentic and relatable drama with an ending that works as a thriller. Cinequest hosts Luba’s world premiere.

Cinequest: LOST SOLACE

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LOST SOLACE
LOST SOLACE

The Canadian psychological thriller Lost Solace takes a highly original premise and turns it into a pedal-to-the-metal thriller.  It’s an astonishingly successful debut for director and co-writer Chris Scheuerman.

Co-writer Andrew Jenkins stars as the psychopath Spence, whose life is devoted to exploiting women, stealing their stuff and emotionally devastating them to boot.   Spence is remarkably skilled and seems unstoppable until he unwisely ingests a recreational drug – he starts suffering hallucinatory episodes that are intensely emotional.  Here’s the brilliantly original core of Lost Solace – having the occasional fit of feelings and empathy really gets in the way of being a coolly cruel psychopath.

Spence targets the emotionally fragile rich girl Azaria (Melissa Roxburgh).  Melissa is burdened both by the care for her violently psychotic brother Jory (Charlie Kerr) and by years of verbal evisceration by her prick of a father, Chuck (Michael Kopsa).  Able to peg Spence as a scumbag, Jory offers Spence a share of his inheritance to kill Chuck.  It’s a plan hatched by a psychotic – what could possibly go wrong?  Add an ambitious physician (Leah Gibson) who is eager to cash in on a cure for psychopathy, and we’re off to the races.

Scheuerman is an economical story-teller who lets the audience connect the dots.  Spence doesn’t even speak until well into the movie. But Scheuerman spins a great tale, and as he reveals his characters, we see that Chuck may be every bit as fiendish as Spence and that Betty the doctor, may be just as greedy.  There’s plenty that can unravel Spence’s Perfect Crime, and that’s what keeps us on the edges of our seats.

Andrew Jenkins is completely believable as both the supremely confident Spence and, later, as the Spence determined to steel his way through his unexpected confusion.   The rest of the cast is exceptional, too, especially Kopsa and Gibson.

So far my personal favorite at Cinequest 2016, Lost Solace will have its World Premiere on Friday, March 4, and screen again on March 6 and 10.