By Mathew Kumar

We were recently pleased to see Not Another Teen Movie playing on a basic cable channel recently, because we rather like that film: it’s easily the best of the genre-parody genre, because it’s knowing, not just randomly gross, and TV—split up by adverts, the swears cut out—always feels like the place where it’s most fun to watch these films. You know—you’re flicking channels and you find it midway through; you don’t really need to invest in it, just enjoy the jokes when you look up from your laptop or whatever. The point we’re making? That we’re looking forward to catching Fired Up—a cheerleader comedy starring Not Another Teen Movie‘s antagonist Eric Christian Olsen—when it hits basic cable. After all, most reviewers are happy enough to go as far as not hating it, with Eye‘s Stuart Berman, for example, noting that it “at least gets the ‘comedy’ part of that equation right some of the time.”
The rest of the week’s pickings are distinctly more revolutionary, from politically (with Che) through musically (with Cadillac Records), and I suppose we can lump Stone of Destiny in with that concept, considering it is about Scottish nationalism, though admittedly in an entirely whimsical fashion.
We’ll start with Stone of Destiny as it closed this year’s TIFF, where we’re sure most local Scots and Scottish descendants who didn’t feel at least slightly weirded out by the film’s overt attempts to make hearts swell about the ongoing debate of Scotland’s independence already saw it. Our opinion? At least Braveheart was so completely nonsensical that it might as well have been set on the moon (loved the way the battle of Stirling Bridge was set on a field, nowhere near any bridges). The Globe and Mail‘s Rick Groen ends his review of the film rather wittily: “By the end, Stone of Destiny barely qualifies as a paperweight.” Che weighs in far heavier at (gulp) 255 minutes. It’s weird that they’d spend so much time on the man who invented a kind of t-shirt that students like to wear, but according to NOW‘s Norm Wilner, neither half of the two part film “lets us know Che Guevara at all.”
In festivals this week, the Caribbean Tales Youth Film Festival continues, and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival begins on Tuesday.