In Revue: What Mediocre Movies We Have

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

This week, Amanda Seyfried squares off against a big bad wolf. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

This week we have a couple of interesting documentaries (one more interesting than the other) opening in town. It’s as if these movies know that Hot Docs 2011 is just over six weeks away! And we strongly advise you to stick to reality and actuality this week, as the one turn into dark fantasy we saw was pretty miserable.

So when Amanda Seyfried ditched Big Love—one of the better television programs of the past decade—because she thought her post–Mama Mia tumble into the limelight would shoot her straight to movie star status, these were the kinds of roles she had in mind, right? Seducing Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore in an Atom Egoyan movie? Or, in this case, playing a gloomy, bosomy version of a character from some old German folk tale?
That Seyfried—who can’t decide whether she wants to be a spunky hardass or a doe-eyed ingénue—is woefully miscast as Red Riding Hood (whose real name is Valerie, apparently) is only one of this film’s vast constellation of problems. Miscasting, after all, makes sense in a film that was poorly conceived and abysmally directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who since debuting with the teeny panic picture Thirteen in 2003 has graduated to fabling moronic adolescent sexuality with Twilight, and now Red Riding Hood. She also made a movie about the birth of Christ, you know, just because.
It’s difficult to even describe a film that functions exclusively as a soundtrack (and Halloween costume) delivery device. But let’s give it a shot, just for sport. Set in a village in an undisclosed location (an early establishing shot shows us a castle that we never see again) in an undisclosed, vaguely Medieval-ish period, Hardwicke’s film expands the simple “don’t talk to strangers” and “stay out of the woods” morals of the original story into a would-be PG epic about a small hamlet and its residents’ uneasy peace with a man-eating werewolf. At their wits end, the villagers solicit outside help with their wolf difficulties. Enter Gary Oldman as Father Solomon, leader of a patrol known for handling wolf-related problems with extreme prejudice.
It soon becomes apparent that the werewolf is someone in the village, leading to the gates being barricaded and the emergence of a boring whodunit—the film does away with the original thematic tension the fairy tale established between the known world of the village and the abyss of the woods, by collapsing the two onto each other. Could the wolf be Valerie’s arranged fiancé (Max Irons)? The roguish lumberjack she’s in love with (Shiloh Fernandez)? Her grandmother (Julie Christie, for some reason), even? Who cares?!
Billy Burke (Twilight, Drive Angry 3D) pokes his head in as Valerie’s canteen-swilling dad, and he’s pretty good. And Oldman always works diligently for his paycheques. Otherwise, though, Red Riding Hood is of interest only to the most diehard Seyfr-heads and poor parents keen to ensure that their nine-year-old kids continue getting dumber.
Red Riding Hood opens Friday, March 11, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

You’re not likely to see a documentary this year that’s more anomalous or haunting than Clio Barnard’s look at the life of British playwright Andrea Dunbar. Dunbar blasted onto the London theatre scene with her breakout play—also called The Arbor—when she was still a teenager. She would die of a brain haemorrhage by the time she was twenty-nine. Largely autobiographical, the play examined the strains of a family living on a council estate commonly referred to as “The Arbor.” But all the nesting dolls of “Arbors” stacking up early in the film only faintly suggest the levels of post-post-modern playfulness Barnard indulges.
The film waffles between a taped staging of Dunbar’s debut play (unfolding, it seems, on a council estate) and recollections from Dunbar’s family and associates, focusing mostly on her tense relationship with her eldest daughter, Lorraine. But these recollections are lip-synced by actors, a technique Barnard calls “verbatim theatre.” The effect is uncanny. The split-second disjoint between the speakers and the audio track immediately attune you to what they’re saying—a formal intervention that demands interest. It also serves to upturn the tired modes of documentary filmmaking, landing somewhere between the talking head interview and the staged re-enactment by paid actors.
Barnard’s formal inventiveness invigorates what may otherwise have been a weepy piece of poverty porn. But the particularities of Dunbar’s life—and the trickle-down trauma that resonated with her children—are inherently compelling, and the whole verbatim theatre thing tends to upstage them. When these distractions recede, though, The Arbor’s examination of patterns of neglect and abuse, and the struggle of the prodigious playwright at its centre, echo through the multiple generations and wrinkles of aesthetic cleverness it presents.
The Arbor opens Friday, March 11, for a limited engagement at the Royal (608 College Street). Click here for showtimes.

What you get out of And Everything Is Going Fine depends entirely on how much time you’re keen on spending with Spalding Gray. There’s a definite charisma to the late American playwright, actor, monologist, etc., that Soderbergh apprehends, largely by stitching together single-camera footage of Gray’s monologues with archival interview footage. Profiling a subject who was so prolific in airing the dirty laundry of his personal life can be easy—just switch on the cameras and listen to him go, even if he’s fudging some of the details for dramatic effect. Soderbergh, who had previously directed a film version of Gray’s humorous monologue Gray’s Anatomy, knows this. And his greatest insight with this documentary is not making any sustained effort to peer behind Gray’s polished presentation of himself.
Going Fine plops us in (sometimes uncomfortable) proximity of Gray, whose refined earthiness and candour can get a little grating. Gray trades in dry, WASP-y laughter for the tittering theatre crowd. He’s like Garrison Keillor or Ira Glass, except he’s entirely at ease talking about his mother’s suicide and his early explorations of homosexuality. Though every bit an American raconteur, there’s something disingenuous about Gray’s blue collar folksiness; something that Soderbergh’s film can’t really prod, given how coiled in it is with its subject. After so many pithy observations about Christian Science, psychotherapy, the facts of life, and the romanticism of Americana, Gray’s sturdy timbre takes on the hazy, dithering quality of a Vermouth-soaked olive rolling around in a martini glass.
As cozy as it is with Gray, Everything Is Going Fine doesn’t want for objectivity—eschewing a string of talking heads flapping about Gray is refreshing. And in focusing with singular exclusivity on Gray’s own autobiographical reckonings, Soderbergh has crafted something other than just a documentary about him: he’s ghost-written Gray’s final, posthumous monologue.
Everything Is Going Fine opened Friday, March 10 for a limited engagement at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). Click here for showtimes.