“Just watch and report back, it’s that simple,” intones the rather tenebrous and passive voice of Parker’s employer over the telephone. Parker (Lindsay Farris) is a rather plebeian private investigator who is a bit of a wreck as of late, owing to the death of his young son and the failed marriage that accrued after […]
VIFF 2015
Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon – VIFF 2015 Review
Refracted through a wistfully nostalgic lens, Douglas Triola’s wonderfully titled documentary, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, is an entertaining and often aggrandizing look back at the once popular publication. Fans of the now defunct satirical counterculture magazine that reached its zenith in the 1970s, and fizzled out by the late […]
Slackjaw – VIFF 2015 Review
What begins as a baffling yet amusing string of non sequitur vignettes, shot rough and strenuous in a camera-verite fashion, eventually and astonishingly is made coherent in Zach Weintraub’s audacious arthouse alternative, Slackjaw. Something of an anomaly on the American indie scene, Weintraub (Bummer Summer, You Make Me Feel So Young) delights in awkward social […]
Ville-Marie – VIFF 2015 Review
Quebecois director Guy Édoin trades in the bucolic setting of his first feature, 2011’s Wetlands, for the metropolitan Montreal borough of Ville-Marie for his ambitious, but ultimately overwrought ensemble drama follow-up. A passion piece akin to Paul Haggis’ sentimental oversell Crash, Ville-Marie similarly frames much of its plot around car crashes and how those tragedies […]
Le coeur de madame Sabali – VIFF 2015 Review
Early on in Ryan McKenna’s (The First Winter) thoughtful, candy-colored tragicomedy, Sabali, Jeannette (Marie Brassard), our put upon protagonist, tells a customer at the hotel where she works that she has a bad heart. This omission is both physically and metaphorically accurate as McKenna takes delight in exploring this eccentric woman in her journey to […]
Los Parecidos (The Similars) – VIFF 2015 Review
Mexico’s Isaac Ezban is two for two with his exhilarant follow-up to last year’s festival front-runner The Incident, the correspondingly science fiction-y mind-manipulator The Similars. Right out of the gate writer/director Ezban declares a wistful throwback via voiceover to the glory days of televised psychological suspense fare like The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. […]