Comedy
Sworn off Swearnet (Warren P. Sonoda). 112 minutes. Opens Friday (August 29). For venues and times, see Movies, page 64. Rating: n
Swearnet represents the second time the Trailer Park Boys (Robb Wells, John Paul Tremblay and Mike Smith) have attempted a project in which they don’t play those characters. Unfortunately, it’s just as ill-conceived as their horrible sketch comedy series, The Drunk And On Drugs Happy Funtime Hour. The trio star as themselves, struggling to earn a living outside their franchise by launching a web series called Swearnet. There’s lots of profanity, dangling male genitalia and consumption of a vast array of illegal substances – all in a desperate attempt for laughs that
never come. The filth of Trailer Park Boys remains, but without likeable characters, a recognizable community or even the suggestion of emotion, it all feels empty. Wells, Tremblay and Smith are decent actors who can improvise potty humour with ease. The trouble is that they aren’t really writers, and clearly need the series’s Mike Clattenberg to provide a world and structure for their jokes to fly. Swearnet is a lazy collection of half-baked ideas performed to little purpose by fully baked actors. Their shtick feels tired, and they even resort to Carrot Top stunt casting, which is embarrassing. The person who fares best is Tom Green, playing himself and whipping up a hefty dose of meta-comedy mocking the fact that he’s even in the movie. It’s a shame he isn’t the Canadian cult comedy icon who can get a film Phil brown financed these days.
Susan Sarandon is superb in this police procedural set in small-town Ontario (!).
thriller
True Calling the Calling (Jason Stone). 108
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minutes. Opens Friday (August 29). For venues and times, see Movies, page 64. Rating: nnnn
It’s remarkable what a little care and attention can do for a familiar genre, and Jason Stone’s The Calling has been made with more than a little of both. It’s an intriguing, idiosyncratic take on the chilly police procedural, with a nicely spiky Susan Sarandon as a de-
tective investigating a creepy murder in rural Fort Dundas, Ontario. Before long, she and her modest staff – including a new transfer from Toronto (Topher Grace, who’s quietly terrific) – are convinced they’re chasing a serial killer. And they’re right. There’s really nothing about The Calling that’s particularly revelatory, as far as chilly police procedurals go. I could point to a dozen movies that use a similar premise, and the mechanics of the plot are fairly banal. But producer/screenwriter Scott Abramovitch, adapting a novel by
Inger Ash Wolfe, is more interested in the characters than the situation, and director Stone fills his movie with a fantastic, engaged cast that also includes Ellen Burstyn (as Sarandon’s mother), Gil Bellows, Kristin Booth and Donald Sutherland, not a single one of whom is just cashing a cheque. I understand why The Calling is being dumped into megaplexes over the Labour Day weekend. It’s a small, intimate thriller that can’t compete against giant comedies or superhero movies. But it’s a solid film, and it’s norman wilner worth a look.
metafiCtional fantasy
Loony toons
Mike Smith (right) videotapes Pat Roach as Swearnet’s mascot. What a mess.
the CongreSS (Ari Folman). 123 minutes.
also opening
Opens Friday (August 29). For venues and times, see Movies, page 64. Rating: nn
Freely adapted from a short story by Stanislaw Lem, The Congress opens in the present day with Robin Wright playing herself – or rather, a version of herself. This Wright didn’t sign on to House Of Cards, has been struggling to find decent work and is now considering selling the rights to her likeness to a movie studio so she can “star” in computer-generated features – forever young and beautiful, able to do things the real Wright no longer can. The sequence where Wright allows her physical self to be “captured” is a marvel of performance and timing: she’s fantastic. But then the action leaps 20 years into the future, when Wright appears at a meeting of the world’s corporate leaders – a meeting for which all attendees must inhale a chemical that causes them to hallucinate that they’re now in a cartoon world – and The Congress explodes into animated anarchy, abandoning its themes of identity and personal agency as the ’toon Wright is dragged through a series of chases and shootouts by a square-jawed hero voiced by Jon Hamm.
As Above, So Below (D: John Erick Dowdle, 93 min) A group of explorers venture into the catacombs beneath the streets of Paris and encounter something pretty creepy. Sounds like a mix of The Descent and the [REC] movies. The cast of relative unknowns includes Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman and Edwin Hodge. Opens Friday (August 29). Screened after press time – see review August 29 at nowtoronto.com/movies.
Robin Wright, playing a version of herself, lights up in disappointing movie.
Once we’re locked into that reality, writer/director Ari Folman (Waltz With Bashir) plunges into a spectacular mess of competing ideas, vintage cartoon imagery and sci-fi pap, complete with a dystopian coda that makes things
even messier. I don’t doubt for a moment that The Congress is exactly the movie Folman wanted to make. But I can’t imagine it’s one anybody else will enjoy.
Perdita Weeks and Ben Feldman head underground and get scared.
norman wilner NOW august 28 - september 3 2014
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