In Revue: Doing the Time Warp…Again

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.

Zach Braff. We have literally nothing clever to say about him. Wait. He’s a real…Zach…Braff. That’s all we’ve got. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

This week, in honour of Torontoist being based in Toronto and Toronto being based in Canada, we lean a little heavy on the Canadian content. And while we support Canadian films and filmmakers (in theory) we can’t say we were overwhelmed with this week’s Beaver Hour offerings. But we did see an excellent documentary that is not playing at Hot Docs. That’s two weeks in a row that we’ve reviewed docs that outstrip Hot Docs fare. What gives? Find out what gives, after the jump.

Winner of the Best Canadian First Feature award at TIFF 2010, The High Cost of Living marks a confident, if uneven, feature debut from Deborah Chow. Chow plunks an impeccably scruffy Zach Braff into a Montreal that seems worlds away from the dry upper-crustiness of the city that we saw in Barney’s Version. Braff plays Henry, a New York expat living in Montreal, where he slums around in his disordered Chinatown apartment, slinging prescription drugs to methadone-addled single mothers. (His “only FDA-approved” policy speaks to the hazy ethics at the core of his enterprise, especially considering repeated suggestions that he’s moving expired pills.)
While driving around Montreal’s sometimes confusing labyrinth of one-way streets with half a whisky buzz, Henry accidentally runs over a pregnant woman, Nathalie (Isabelle Blais). With an expired visa and a tackle-box full of drugs (FDA-approved or not) on him, he hastily takes off, leaving her in the street. Nathalie wakes up in the hospital to find that she’s lost the baby, sending her into a depressive spiral that’s not at all helped by her scowling, unsupportive baby’s-daddy (Patrick Labbé). Enter Henry, so wracked by guilt that he tracks down Nathalie and starts tending to her, like some twee manic pixie dream boy who murdered her unborn baby.
In its first reel, The High Cost of Living shapes up fairly well, sketching the lives of its cast with a passable degree of subtlety. And while Braff’s presence grates (he’s sounding more and more like a croaky Ray Romano), Chow initially pulls off a nice trick: using an American star (of sorts) to pass off what is more-or-less a French-language drama on an Anglophone audience. But as the tackiness mounts, and Nathalie begins to fall for Henry (in a weird form of blind Stockholm syndrome), Chow’s film falls apart.
In straining to hit the beats of a breezy rom-com, while also pounding at its themes of guilt, remorse, responsibility, and all that, High Cost tries to have it every which way, all at once. Struggling to find its tone, the film is emotionally cluttered and at times thematically incoherent. Chow does shine in mining all the schmaltzy bits, and in juggling the motivations of her film’s various characters (except for Labbé’s Michel, who mostly just scowls). While those are all impressive feats for a first-timer, High Cost still comes off feeling more workmanlike than truly accomplished.
The High Cost of Living opens Friday, April 22, in select cinemas. Click here for showtimes.

Probably the most impressive feat any documentary film can pull off is making someone give a damn about its subject. And especially if the viewer is terminally disinterested in that subject. And extra-especially if that subject is fashion. But leave it to the gang at the New York Times, who can spin a yarn about a guy selling single cigarettes into an incredibly compelling read, to stitch together an exceptionally entertaining film about Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham.
Cunningham, the argument goes, basically invented street style—those broadsheet pages of everyday people hopping curbs or picking up dog excrement that have served as the basis for everything from The Sartorialist to VICE’s “Dos and Don’ts.” In the 1970s, Cunningham began curating “Out on the Street,” a weekly Times feature that tracked the emergence of fashion trends off the runway. Bare shoulders, baggy pants, and houndstooth jackets weren’t invented by Cunningham, but “Out on the Street” served to cement their status as legit fashion trends.
For those of us who think fashion is utilitarian in the same way a car or a condom is, Cunningham’s whole persona is refreshing. He dresses sharp, but not flashy, happily duct-taping up rips in his dollar store rain poncho. He eats at McDonald’s, and bikes all over Manhattan to shoot the parties and high-society hurrahs that constitute his bread and butter. And he’s eighty-plus. Cunningham’s fondness for fashion seems almost arbitrary, the same way someone else may gravitate towards food or film or Silver Age Green Lantern comics. It’d be tricky to make him seem anything but spry and gregarious. But director Press makes Cunningham feel so outstandingly, effervescently alive that it’s hard not be infected by his pure gusto. Even if you’re the kind of person who refuses to spend more than $40 on shoes or who just automatically buys the same style of jeans each time the crotch wears out.
Bill Cunningham New York opens Friday, April 22, for a limited engagement at the Varsity (55 Bloor Street West). Click here for showtimes.

Hey, you know what would be a great idea for a movie? Someone getting stuck in a time loop where they live the same day over and over again until they learn a valuable life lesson and free themselves from their infinitely recurring existential-temporal snare. Oh, what? They already did that and it’s called Groundhog Day and it’s one of the most ingenious and beloved comedies ever? Well, whatever. Let’s just do it with three people, instead of just Bill Murray, and try to make it all super, duper dark. And add dirt bikes.
Enter Repeaters, Carl Bessai’s abysmal sci-fi thriller about a trio of twenty-somethings in rehab who are forced to re-live the same day over and over because of a freak lightning storm or some shit. Starting with the fact that Bessai has the gall to rip off an existing concept that is hugely popular and think that nobody will notice if he makes it about as dark as a pouty teen in a “Why So Serious?” T-shirt, nothing about Repeaters works.
Like in Groundhog Day (which was funny and good), the lethally sombre Repeaters runs its trio of sulking heroes through a gauntlet of emotions as they understand that they’re doomed to, you know, repeat themselves. First they run amok, getting all drunk and high and making a drug dealer lick poop. Then they despair. Then they realize maybe they’ve been given the chance to repair their broken relationships. The broodiest one (Richard de Klerk) goes off the rails, getting all rapey and ultraviolent, leaving the other two to stop him. And it’s all set to a soundtrack that sounds like a droning, (appropriately) repetitive Silver Mt. Zion loop. Devoid of real emotion and imagination (and packing a limp dirt-bike chase scene), Repeaters is the kind of film that makes Canadians upset that their tax dollars get funnelled into Telefilm.
Repeaters opens Friday, April 22 in for a limited engagement (very limited, we suspect) at AMC Yonge & Dundas (10 Dundas Street East). Click here for showtimes.