I had hoped to curate a special Canada Day issue, but … well, do you feel like there’s much to celebrate this year? The residential-school death toll feels like it’s just getting started, and Thursday’s holiday felt like a national day of mourning from where I’m sitting. So I went ahead and curated my own double-feature this week, and that’s where the newsletter will start.
Canada Day Weekend Double Feature
There isn’t a lot of cinema about the colonization of Canada and the impact of residential schools that I feel comfortable recommending; a lot of the dramatic features were made by non-Indigenous filmmakers, which can create a distanced perspective at best and a pandering, condescending take at worst. Mohawk writer/director Tracey Deer’s excellent new film Beans, which dramatizes the Oka crisis as she experienced it from the sidelines as a pre-teen, won’t be hitting theatres and VOD until the end of this month, but you should definitely keep an eye out for that.
Two films you can and should watch right now, though, are Jeff Barnaby’s 2013 debut Rhymes For Young Ghouls and Alanis Obomsawin’s 2017 documentary Our People Will Be Healed.
Barnaby’s first feature follows 70s teenager Alia (Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, in her breakout performance) as she’s ripped from her rez in Northern Quebec and sent to a residential school by a local cop abusing his authority. Barnaby gives the school scenes the surreal texture of a nightmare, as if he’s showing us how Alia will eventually remember her experience: it’s hallucinatory and disorienting, like a bad dream she can’t shake off. When she gets back home, everyone knows exactly what she’s been through; the whole film is steeped in collective trauma. (For those of us on the outside, the knowledge that the residential school programs are coming to an end is no comfort at all; as Barnaby told me when we spoke in 2014, Canada just moved its indifference into other programs.)
Obomsawin’s documentary is her 50th project in as many years, and one of the first to explore the burgeoning decolonization movement at the Helen Betty Osborne Ininiw Education Resource Centre in northern Manitoba, where Cree students are immersed in their own history from nursery to Grade 12. Obomsawin made this film immediately after her 2016 historical documentary We Can’t Make The Same Mistake Twice, which used a landmark court case to enumerate decades of neglect and injustice against Indigenous people by the Canadian federal government. That film laid out the problem; this one shows us the solution. The rest of us just need to get out of the way.
Rhymes For Young Ghouls is available to stream for free on Hoopla; it’s also available on Crave with a Movies+HBO or Starz subscription, and available to rent or buy on digital and on demand.
Our People Will Be Healed is available to stream for free on CBC Gem and TVOntario. And while you’re at it, We Can’t Make The Same Mistake Twice is available to stream for free via the NFB website.
Top streaming pick
If you’d rather watch something that has nothing whatsoever do with Canada, let me suggest Starstruck, a charming romantic comedy that arrived on Crave a few weeks back with almost no fanfare. Produced for the BBC and picked up by HBO Max in the U.S. – which is how Crave got it here – it’s a stealth update of Notting Hill from creator/star Rose Matafeo, a comedian and actor you may have seen in the New Zealand pregnancy comedy Baby Done earlier this year.
Matafeo plays Jessie, a 28-year-old New Zealand émigré living in London who meets a charming guy named Tom (Nikesh Patel) at a club on New Year’s Eve; they go to bed together, enjoy themselves and in the morning she discovers that he’s a bona fide movie star, the kind of actor who toplines big dopey studio action films about driving fast and furiously or saving Mount Olympus and stuff. And over the course of a year, broken into six fairly fleet episodes, the two of them keep running into one another, trying to figure out what’s going on between them.
Written by Matafeo and Alice Snedden, and directed by Karen Maine – whose first feature Yes, God, Yes was a Buried Treasure in the March 6 edition of this very newsletter – it’s a warm, observant and consistently funny character comedy, finding fun new angles within its rom-com structure and clever bits of business for its entire cast. Matafeo and Patel have a great, subtle chemistry – the show takes the idea of “attraction” literally, the leads always slowly moving towards one another whenever they’re in close proximity – and Maine keeps the whole thing moving so confidently that you can watch the whole thing in about two and a quarter hours. I suspect it was originally conceived as a feature film, but it breaks up nicely into bite-sized chunks if you’d prefer to savour it.
And if you haven’t seen Baby Done, do that too: it’s similarly sweet and clever, and currently free to stream on Hoopla.
Starstruck is available to stream on Crave with a subscription to Movies + HBO.
Buried treasure on Netflix Canada
One of the biggest problems with Netflix dropping what feels like dozens of new television series every month is that the flood of programming becomes overwhelming; if you miss something, it feels almost pointless to try to catch up to it. A television show requires a much greater investment of time than a movie, obviously, but there’s also the whole social-media thing: if no one’s talking about a show, is it even worth watching at all?
Well, just as Starstruck flew under the radar, so did Katla, an unapologetically weird drama from Icelandic producer/director Baltasar Kormákur (The Deep, 2 Guns) set in the small town of Vik, which sits on the edge of a glacier – and an active volcano called Katla. About a year ago, Katla erupted, leading most of the population to flee; a handful of researchers and farmers are still around, waiting for something to happen. And then, without any logical explanation, something does: a woman is found out on the glacier, covered in ash and clearly in shock. Who she is, and what happens next, is best left unspoiled, but it’s fair to say that the situation is unconventional – and a hook that’ll keep you coming back for all eight episodes.
Katla is moody and beautiful to look at, and while the show is an ensemble piece, Kormákur slowly narrows its focus onto two characters: Gríma (Guðrún Ýr Eyfjörð) and her father Þór (Ingvar Sigurdsson), who suffered a shared loss in the initial eruption and are now offered a chance to reconcile their grief with… well, no, that’d be telling. Just watch the first episode, and see if you don’t want to keep going. I binged the whole thing in a weekend.
All eight episodes of Katla are available to stream on Netflix Canada.
Last chance to stream
The arrival of a fifth Purge film this week got me thinking about the little wave of eat-the-rich movies that popped up in 2019. Knives Out got all the attention, but Ready Or Not got there first, opening a few weeks before Rian Johnson’s baroque murder mystery landed at TIFF and gobbled up all the attention.
Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, Ready Or Not is also about a weird, wealthy family that gathers at an isolated estate, but its body count is much higher and its debauchery off the charts: the monied Le Domas clan has assembled to celebrate the wedding of Alex (Mark O’Brien) to Grace (Samara Weaving), a lovely young woman who, as tradition dictates, must play a game with her new in-laws at midnight. The game turns out to be hide and seek, and the Le Domases take that one very seriously: they’re going to have to hunt Grace and kill her in order to fulfill a century-old blood pact, as you do.
It’s a ridiculous premise, but screenwriters Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy build a world where it almost makes sense, turning the Le Domas family lore into a metaphor for generations of abuse and trauma, most of it carried in Adam Brody’s genuinely tragic turn as Alex’s brother, who’s been carrying the emotional damage for both of them. (Melanie Scrofano and Kristian Bruun have a lot more fun as the most cheerfully debauched Le Domases, neither of whom believes in any of this stuff but both of whom are more than happy to play along if it makes the family happy.) And Weaver is an especially resourceful and resilient hero; Grace would get along just great with You’re Next’s Sharni Vinson. They could bond over their shared fondness for edged weapons.
Ready Or Not is available to stream on Crave with a Movies + HBO subscription through July 31.
If you like this, you might like that
Amazon’s new sci-fi actioner The Tomorrow War draws inspiration from a dozen genre movies that predate it, and one of the most influential turns out to be Doug Liman’s Edge Of Tomorrow. Which doesn’t surprise me, I guess, since that particular alien-invasion actioner is one of the most inventive of its kind.
Edge Of Tomorrow casts Tom Cruise as a hapless military spokesman thrust into a war against rampaging ETs in France, where he’s immediately killed and then forced to repeat that day over and over again, always dying and always snapping back for a fresh start. When it premiered seven years ago, it was an almost impossible sell, mostly because of the meaningless studio-imposed title and a trailer that didn’t even start to convey how much fun it is to watch Cruise and co-star Emily Blunt spar with one another as she trains him to use his situation to his advantage and maybe also save the human race. (As someone far sharper than me pointed out at the time, the real high-concept here is watching Tom Cruise play a panicked idiot who learns how to be Tom Cruise, and you just can’t explain that in a 30-second TV spot.)
But now that every other sci-fi movie has a time-loop plot, Edge Of Tomorrow is a snap to understand and a blast to watch, a mixture of existential comedy and inventive sci-fi action that never takes a wrong step, eventually expanding into a ensemble picture as Cruise grows closer to his squadmates and starts trying to protect them rather than use them as cannon fodder. It’s a perfect summer movie, is what I’m saying… and though it’s not (weirdly) currently available on any streaming services, Warner’s recently upgraded the VOD edition to 4K and Dolby Atmos, so I’d say it’s well worth a $4.99 rental.
Edge Of Tomorrow is available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and most other VOD services. The Tomorrow War is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video Canada.
Play us out
And that’s the newsletter for another week. For further reading, a bounty awaits you on the NOW site, starting with our weekly review digest and ending with our looks at what’s coming to Netflix, Crave, Disney+, Amazon and CBC Gem this month. There’s a lot! There always is. Which is why I write this column, to help you wade through it.
Oh, and you might also want to check out Tuesday’s episode of NOW What, where Glenn Sumi, Daniel de Souza and I talk about Disney’s current issues with queer representation as seen in Loki, Luca, Cruella and a few other properties. You can find it on your podcast platform of choice, or right here at the bottom of this page. I like to be helpful.
Email me at normw@nowtoronto.com if you’re so inclined, or hit me up on Twitter at @normwilner. And keep an eye on nowtoronto.com/movies for content throughout the week, of course.