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Movie Mondays: Turning Down the Suck Since 2010
As a means of rounding up Toronto’s various cinematic goings-on each week, Movie Mondays compiles the best rep cinema and art house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements.
It’s kind of a sleepy week, rep cinema-wise in the city. Considering that TIFF starts on Thursday—brazen plug: make sure to check Torontoist and not any other source for all your festival coverage—it seems like many of the cinemas are just kind of throwing up their hands, acknowledging that they can’t compete with all these “new” movies. But as ever, there’s still plenty of worthwhile stuff going on this week, including one of this summer’s best-reviewed films, one of its worst, a documentary about a radical American academic, and a mock-documentary about two radical hoser ne’er-do-wells.
The Fox (2236 Queen Street East)
It’s nice to live in an age where a film about the tribulations two lesbian parents can earn swells of critical acclaim and healthy box office receipts without having to call attention to its premise as a selling point. After all, it was only five years ago that Brokeback Mountain circulated in the media under the backhandedly derisive (though ostensibly accurate) moniker of “that gay cowboy movie.” Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right casts Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a couple whose children become consumed with wanting to meet their biological father, an anonymous sperm donor played by Mark Ruffalo. A sweet and funny look at the unique problems faced by modern families in post-Prop 8 America, The Kids Are All Right is a lovely dramedy, refreshing in its universality. (Sure you can niggle over the fact that the lesbian relationship has to be triangulated by a heterosexual male presence. Or you can just shut up and enjoy a pretty great movie.) The Kids Are All Right continues its second run at The Fox at 7 p.m. on Monday, where it plays until Wednesday. 
The Underground (186 Spadina Avenue)
Man, between this and our early TIFF coverage, we’ve really been plugging the Fubar franchise. But can you blame us? The first Fubar is actually never not funny, and the forthcoming Fubar II promises to be just as great. Capitalizing on the hype surrounding the TIFF premiere of the sequel this Friday, The Underground is screening 2002’s Fubar at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. If you’ve never seen it before, we won’t even bother telling you what it’s about. Because really, it’s about getting right ripped with your buddies, getting rowdy, and basically just living every day blind and goin’ the distance. It’s also the most poignant and important cinematic portrait of the Canadian everyman since Goin’ Down the Road. Terry and Deaner also give ‘er way harder than Pete and Joey. 
The Bloor (506 Bloor Street)
When Howard Zinn passed away in January of this year, America lost one of its most important public intellectuals. A prominent historian, academic, socialist, and anti-war advocate, Zinn became a household name in 1980 with the publication of his A People’s History of the United States, a lengthy survey of U.S. history from the point-of-view of the oppressed, the resilient, and the rebellious. But the book, which has been updated numerous times since its initial publication, is only one of Zinn’s many major accomplishments. After serving as a bombardier in the Second World War, Zinn became highly attuned to the ethical dilemmas inherent in warfare, eventually emerging as one of the most outspoken and uncompromising proponents of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. In one of the last interviews Zinn gave before his death, he expressed a want to be remembered “for introducing a different way of thinking about the world, about war, about human rights, about equality.” Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller’s documentary You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train proves that Zinn is able to perform his life’s work posthumously. The doc screens at The Bloor at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, and will be introduced by Naomi Klein. 
The Revue (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
In this age of ironic recuperation of shit, everyone’s looking for the next misunderstood masterpiece they can lay claim to on the basis of it somehow being so bad it’s good. If you want to plough through the freshest crap, there’s likely no better place to start than this summer’s universally reviled The Last Airbender. Based on the Nickelodeon kids show, M. Night Shyamalan’s high-fantasy about a world where elemental clans duel for supremacy drew criticism for its stiff acting, excessive use of exposition, stupid plot twists (in an M. Night Shyamalan film, no less!), uninspired use of 3-D technology, and more generally, for just not being really very good at all. With the ostensible exception of Jonah Hex, Airbender is probably the worst movie of this summer. Who knows, it could be the next Troll 2, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, or Adventures of Pluto Nash. And The Revue kicks off its second-run engagement of this little turd Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m., giving you the perfect chance to get all baked, squint really hard at it, and then come home and tell your roommates that “Like but no man, you have to see this thing!”Photos by Eugen Sakhnenko/Torontoist.