Film Friday: Unaccompanied Kids (in the Hall)

Can you believe that Unaccompanied Minors features three out of five Kids in the Hall? Neither can we! Or that the film is directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig and features lots of other excellent folks such as The Office’s BJ Novak. We can still believe it sucks, though. Which, apparently, it does. Called “a generally lousy movie” by Now’s Deirdre Swain, she notes, oddly, that Tyler James Williams is a “particular standout, as uncomfortable as it is to see the black kid turned into a clown.”

What on earth does that mean? Hasn’t she heard of Clowning?

Further confusing is how much John Harkness seems to like the utterly stale looking Blood Diamonds, turning over about half of his review to cuss people who don’t like Leonardo DiCaprio because he “looks young”. Well, John, we don’t like him because he’s got a stupid face. Give us 10 minutes to reshape it with a big heavy shovel and then we’ll talk.

Jason Anderson takes a different tack; while John seems happy to ignore the (supposedly noble) educational concept of the film, Jason takes umbrage with its use as an excuse to do, you know, chase scenes and explosions. The “script is glutted with talking-point aphorisms that must've seemed meaningful on paper but seem implausible and trite in people's mouths.” If anyone can explain to Torontoist what on earth the line of dialogue "In America, it's bling-bling but here, it's bling-blang" means, that would be helpful, it just seems nonsense to us.

How on earth do you ensure you’re not buying dodgy illegal diamonds, anyway? Isn’t that choice made quite far up the supply chain? Can I really be sure anyone at a randomly picked jeweler has any idea where they came from? (Perhaps; we don’t have the money to test this out. Readers! Why not buy us some diamonds and send them to us with a note explaining if they’re bad or not?)

Ahem. This week we like Now and Eye’s disagreement over The Holiday; Glenn Sumi gushes over a “charming subplot about old movies”, Eye’s Adam Nayman calls it a “simpering movie in-joke”. FIGHT!

Everyone agrees The Puffy Chair is good, though.

Tonight the Cinema Studies Student Union at U of T ends its Free Friday Film season with a series of student shorts at 6pm, followed up by Richard Linklater’s astonishingly dull adaptation of A Scanner Darkly at 7:30pm. Very faithful to the (brilliant) book, it unavoidably loses Phillip K. Dick’s lyrical skills; a shame, debatably worth the time, even if it's free. See the shorts, at least, though, folks, at Innis Town Hall, 2 Sussex.

Of course, there’s some competition tonight, with Cinematheque Ontario’s Fall season ending this weekend; tonight at 6:15pm, Jackman Hall (AGO, 317 Dundas W.) the Vancouver New Wave season makes a splash with Kissed.