In Revue: Hello, Ladies!

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.

Their bridal shower power is no match for Kristen Wiig’s glower power. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

Holy smokes, gang. What a week. First of all, we have three movies that all range from very good to outstanding. And we’ve got an unusually high quotient of female-friendly content, with Kelly Reichardt, Michelle Williams, and Kristen Wiig winning our minds, hearts, and funny bones (respectively). Now, it’s not our fault. But the brutal truth is that summer movie season is usually about jacked superheroes or car thieves, which leaves little place for female leads. But the tables have turned! At least for this week, anyhow.

The bold, pink block-font declaration that “CHICK FLICKS DON’T HAVE TO SUCK!” ironed on most promotional posters for Bridesmaids kind of misses the point, because SNL vet Kristen Wiig’s first major star vehicle isn’t really a chick flick. At least not in the way that Something Borrowed, Waiting to Exhale, or An Officer and a Gentleman are chick flicks. It’s a chick flick like Thelma and Louise is a chick flick: a rejigging of macho-genre boilerplate framing a brash, defiantly sexual, and (in this case) most of all funny form of female sexuality. Call it Funny People with Vaginas.
Of course, it may have been easier not to wince at the film’s “Hangover for women” pitch were it not produced by Judd Apatow, whose bromantic operas of male schlubdom have come under fire repeatedly for reductive treatment of female characters (with 2007’s Knocked Up being the most egregious offender). But Apatow or no, Bridesmaids more or less works.
Wiig (who co-wrote with Annie Mumolo) stars as Annie, a miserable maid of honour to her lifelong best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph). While Lillian’s life is all veils and champagne and surprise bachelorette trips, Annie recently lost her baking business, her boyfriend, her apartment, and is being dicked around by her hunky sometimes–fuck buddy (Jon Hamm, who finally hits the smarmy-funny notes we’ve been waiting for him to attack). Basically, Annie’s the distaff version of Steve Carrell in The Forty Year-Old Virgin or Seth Rogen in Knocked Up: a well-meaning sad-sack too wracked with self-loathing to get her shit together. And her inability to do so is further stymied by Helen (Rose Byrne), an obnoxiously wealthy hot mess vying for Lillian’s BFF-ship.
Feig (Freaks and Geeks) practises the seen-and-not-heard directorial sensibility that gently guides most of these Apatowian buddy-coms. Though some of the gags fall flat (a shit and puke scene during a dress-fitting never hits the Farrelly brothers heights it aims for), and the film is almost as overlong as Funny People (almost), much of it works rather well. And best: it’s really funny. Though Wiig’s purse-lipped mousiness has served her well in supporting roles (MacGruber, Paul) she’s able to enliven nearly every scene she’s in—especially a bout of pill-induced kookiness aboard an airplane and the inevitable bridal shower freakout.
Add an excellent Wendi McLendon-Covey (Reno 911!), a squirmingly uncomfortable cameo by Tim Heidecker (as Lillian’s mostly mute fiancé, a nice twist on relegated female roles in most male-centred coms), a character named Bill Cozby, and some emotional side-plotting that outstrips anything seen in any other Apatow production (this side of The Larry Sanders Show, anyhow), and you’ve got a film that’s as much a corrective to the “chick flick” as it is to the frat-house mentality of most mainstream American film comedies.
Bridesmaids opens Friday, May 13 in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

Audiences and critics alike are sure to make a fuss (or at the very least notice) the curious 4:3 canvas of Kelly Reichardt’s melancholy western. Certainly, the boxy, televisual aspect ratio seems immediately anti-western, precluding the sun-drenched vistas and magic-hour panoramas of Hawks, Ford, or even modern practitioners of the genre like John Hillcoat. It’s a testament to Reichardt’s commitment to her parched aesthetic of austerity that she doesn’t just delimit dips into genre indulgence—she disqualifies them entirely.
Taking up the true-ish story a group of families mislaid on the Oregon Trail, having been led astray by the half-charismatic and half-crazy frontiersman Stephen Meek (an outstanding Bruce Greenwood), Meek’s Cutoff again sees Reichardt using the dreary flatness of Oregon as a dusty purgatory for her players. With 2008’s Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt cast Michelle Williams as a cash-strapped 20-something circumnavigating a network of strip mall parking lots and scraggly berms. Here Williams plays Emily Tetherow, an iron-willed and compassionate de facto matriarch whose puckered sneers and sidelong glances undermine Meek’s authority over the waylaid wagon train more than the hushed discussions of her husband (Will Patton) and the other men do.
Like Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s ambles around rather deliberately, trailing the pioneers’ march toward California (and, more urgently, a fresh water source) as if it were an ever-receding horizon. Shots of Conestoga wagons creaking across Reichardt’s tapered frame give a sense of the party’s stasis: as if the ground is merely pulling back beneath them in some cruel, Jamiroquaian trick. The sense here is not just of time, of duration marked in panting breaths and accruing layers of desert dust, but of a vast space that seems to fold back on itself.
But it’s not just Gerry as costume drama or something. Meek’s presents the desperation and borderline madness of the American West with an almost undue finesse. It’s easy to shoehorn in allegories about Manifest Destiny or imperial conquest—especially when Meek hogties a wandering native (Rod Rondeaux) who is forced to serve as his guide. But best leave all that stuff to Ravenous. Meek’s isn’t so much about existential aimlessness of capital-a America as it is about the implications of the historical moment the film inhabits. Superbly acted and directed, Meek’s seems to be more about the frontier—about the ambling slog towards something whose existence you increasingly doubt with each trudging footstep.
Meek’s Cutoff opens Friday, May 13, for a limited engagement at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West) as part of The New Auteurs: Kelly Reichardt. Click here for showtimes.

There’s a palpable sense of patience that courses through The Strange Case of Angelica. And it’s well earned. Manoel de Oliveira, after all, is 102 and, by most estimates, the Portuguese auteur is the oldest practicing filmmaker in the world. Two lifetimes worth of prolific work and sheer, well, age, may suggest that a world-weariness hangs over Oliveira’s film. Not quite. Angelica isn’t sluggish so much as serene—a light and refreshing fable on death and obsession.
In a small village, Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa), a withdrawn photographer, is summoned in the middle of the night to snap a photo of Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala), a gorgeous local woman who has fallen dead. And on her wedding day, no less. As he frames the deceased beauty in his camera, she seems to shake from her stillness and appears to smile at Isaac. Then, when he hangs the photos to develop, she comes alive again, seeming to beckon Isaac into some other world.
Maybe it’s a nod to the brief instant in Chris Marker’s La jetée when a flicker of motion erupts from a procession of still photographs. Or maybe it’s just a bit of macabre whimsy on the part of Oliveira, or a hallucination on Isaac’s part. In any case, the young photographer spends the remainder of the film mulling around, tormented by dreams of the not-so-dead girl.
Isaac’s odd behaviour begins to drum up suspicion in the house where he boards; they begin to fret that the boy just ain’t right. (Their worries are justified, perhaps, by Isaac’s fantasies of floating around some ethereal night sky with the ghost of Angelica.) Imaginative, delicate, and melancholy, Angelica may not be a film a century in the making, but it’s a welcome picture from a living legend.
The Strange Case of Angelica opens Friday, May 13 for a limited engagement at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). Click here for showtimes.