Cynical Cinema

The first five minutes of The Tracey Fragments are all over the place. Pictures in pictures, fragmented story, bizarre “fragmented” filming. And while you have no idea what’s going on, it makes you want to watch. What’s happening? All we really know is that Ellen Page is wearing only a shower curtain, at the back of a bus, searching for her missing younger brother, who thinks he’s a dog. Which all seems very interesting, and really made me excited for the rest of the movie, when it was going to turn into a traditional narrative and explain the story, and stop with this bizarre fragmented filming. And it does explain the story. But it doesn’t have a traditional narrative. And the fragmented editing does not stop. Ever. In the whole movie.

I don’t mind unconventional narrative. I don’t mind jumping through time, disjointed stories, or bizarre filming techniques. But this was too much. Too much weird, most of it seemingly for the sake of being weird. Her father is a jerk, her mother is a seemingly catatonic chain smoker, there is a creepy pimp, a hooker on a bus, a new hot boy in school who looks like Lou Reed, a bizarre transvestite psychiatrist, high school bullies, George Strombolopolous, a big fat clown at a birthday party, a crow, a lowlife named Lance from Toronto, a bar fight, a peeler bar, a crazy drunk who stands on his head, a strange sit-com intro out of nowhere, a rapist, and a ton of other weird things. All of this thrown at us in fragments, in picture-in-picture style, with overwhelming results. We have no idea what to focus on, which I suppose is the point.

But then we get to the end, which is incredibly sad and rotten and brutal, but it doesn’t carry the emotional resonance that it should, because we’re so offput by the strange filming style throughout the film that we really don’t have anything invested in any of the characters. Her little brother is cute, sure. And Lance is basically a good guy. And we like Ellen Page (Tracey) just because she’s Ellen Page and she’s always pretty awesome. But what should be a terribly devastating end to a movie just feels disconcerting and irritating. And I was kind of sorry I’d sat through the entire movie just to get there.

The movie isn’t terrible. It’s artsy and well-acted and ambitious. But it’s almost impossible to watch, and it’s almost impossible to connect with any characters. I think there’s a good movie in here, but Bruce McDonald, the director, is trying so hard to be artistic that he loses sight of what that good movie really is. McDonald has done some really good work in his Canadian career - Highway 61, Hard Core Logo, but here he is just reaching too far. The Tracey Fragments is ambitious and interesting, but it isn’t good. It comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films.

Walk All Over Me is a Canadian film starring Leelee Sobieski and Tricia Helfer.  You can tell it’s Canadian by Minute Four, and you can tell nothing cool is going to happen by Minute Nine.  And you can tell you regret renting it by Minute Eleven.  And you can stop watching it right then and there.  The premise of the movie is that Leelee Sobieski is Alberta, a hot small-town teenage girl who runs away from home after getting into trouble with some thugs.  She runs to Vancouver, where she decides to hide out with Celine (Tricia Helfer), who is either a friend or a relative.  Or something.  Celine, you see, is a dominatrix.  And I know the nerds out there are excited already.  Tricia Helfer?  Dominatrix?  Yes…yes…and they are hosting Battlestar Galactica marathons in order to prepare themselves to watch this.

But you know what?  Tricia Helfer does not get naked.  Leelee Sobieski becomes a dominatrix too, but she also does not get naked.  Then why bother having the “dominatrix” theme in the movie at all?  Because it means that this way Sobieski gets to spend the entire movie in fishnets and cleavage-boosting bustiers and spiked heels on CFM boots.  And it also means that much of the film will take place in weird rooms, and people “not knowing what that weird helmet is for” becomes the standard punchline to jokes that were never told.  But there is almost no actual dominatrix action whatsoever, it’s just the clothes that appear in the film.  Which would be fine if you were making a porno, but this movie takes itself almost seriously.

It’s one of those crime capers where bad guys are after a good guy because they believe he stole some money, and bad guys capture good guys, and new guys get involved, and new guys capture bad guys, and bad guys trade good guys with new guys.  One of those.  But Canadian.  Obviuously Canadian.  And therefore painfully boring and not too good.  Perhaps the idea was that putting Sobieski and Helfer in boob-showing shirts and fishnets and short skirts and hooker boots would distract people from the lack of plot, the poor acting and the senseless story.  And, in a way, that DID actually work on me.  After all, how many times have I mentioned it in this review alone?  And the clothes and girls DID keep me watching past the eleven minute mark.  But by then I had seen everything, and I wished I had turned it off.  So there’s my advice to you.  Eleven minutes in.  Turn this off and watch a fishing show.

          “Cruising Bar” is a French Canadian movie from 1989 that comes out on DVD tomorrow, June 10th, from Alliance Films.  It’s a film by Robert Menard that stars Michel Cote in four different roles.  All four characters are heading out to the bars in an attempt to pick up women.  One is a self-centred obnoxious yuppie named Charles, one is an annoying stereotypical nerd named George, another is an irritating sleazy married auto-parts dealer named Gerry, and the last is a mulletted junkie loser named Patrick who is broken-hearted over his breakup with his girlfriend.  So…there are the four main characters - Patrick, Gerry, George and Charles.  These are the names that appear on the English subtitles.  However, the names the characters are given on-screen, in French, are Jean-Jacques, Gerard, Patrice and Serge.  Do the subtitle people really think that English audiences can’t understand French names? 

          Apparently, no.  Even the title, “Cruising Bar”, gets a bizarre translation into English on the DVD box - why not call it “Cruising Bar” in English as well?  It’s already an English title.  But it gets “translated” to “Meet Market”.  Which is odd, but not as odd as the subtitles themselves.  Not only are the actual names of the characters changed, so is virtually everything else.  The yuppie snob meets a woman who says quite clearly (in French) that her name is Louise.  It shows up on the screen as “Julie”.  A bartender offers him an O’Keefe.  The screen says Coors Light.  A woman tells him she runs 160 kilometres a day, to see if he’s paying attention.  The screen says 90.  Fifteen years becomes sixteen years.  And the actual French dialogue is quite a bit different than the English subtitles, and if you understand French, you’re way better off switching them off altogether.  It’s like someone created the words on the screen with the sound off.  It’s two different movies. 

          As the movie goes on, we see the yuppie being obnoxiously yuppie, the nerdy guy being irritatingly nerdy, the sleazy married guy being over-the-top in his sleaziness and his married life, and the junkie being an annoyingly desperate loser.  It’s great that Michel Cote can play all four characters so convincingly (it really did take me a long time to realize it was the same actor in all four roles), but they are all so annoying that it grates.  Do they really have to ALL be such obnoxious over-the-top caricatures?  And really, although there are four stories going on at the same time, we really don’t care at all about any of them, because we don’t like any of the characters.  The yuppie goes to a snob bar.  The nerd goes to a punk bar (remember, this movie was made in 1989 - 1989 “punk” was a cartoon in itself).  The sleazy guy hits a sleazy low-rent motel bar, and the junkie with a mullet goes to a regular disco. 

          The only story that’s compelling even a bit is that of the poor, put-upon nerd who just can’t get it right as he moves from the punk bar to a country bar where they won’t let him in.  But even the bars are stereotyped as badly as the characters.  He ends up in a gay bar, and the stereotypes come flying out.  One thing I absolutely hate in movies is the idea that a guy who gets turned down by even the ugliest women in the world, because of his appearance and personality, will be hit on by gay guys.  Like the idea is that gay guys will try to sleep with absolutely anything where women would never go.  Don’t gay guys have standards too?  Not only that, but the most offensive stereotype shows up at the end, when the big, tough, muscled biker gay guy shows up, and chases the nerd around the room, presumably to have sex with him against his will.  And the big “payoff”?  The grand finale, the punch line of the movie?  Gay rape.  Get it?  Hahaha, he isn’t even gay! 

          But the night ends badly for everyone.  Gerard’s wife shows up (in disguise) at the bar he’s cruising, and he unwittingly picks her up and takes her to the room he’s rented for the night.  Again…hahaha.  Only this time the camera doesn’t show us, the viewer, her face ever.  Are we to believe that we, the people watching, would recognize her, while her own husband wouldn’t?  At any rate, there isn’t much to recommend this film.  It’s Canadian, Michel Cote flexes several of his acting muscles, and…there is a guy with a terrific Joe Dirt mullet.  Other than that, I got nothing. 

All Hat is a movie that seems to be strangely unsure of itself. When I picked it up, I was fairly excited. Everyone on the cover was wearing cowboy hats and carrying guns. Shotguns and pistols and so forth. However, the movie is not a western. Not really, anyway. And it doesn’t involve that many guns. In fact, there are guns in only one scene, and they are both pistols, and the shotgun on the cover of the DVD box never makes an appearance. The whole movie, I was looking for that shotgun. When is it going to show up? Does someone get their head blown off? Or will they just be scared away by the cocking sound the shotgun makes? It never materialized. I was so desperate to see a shotgun by the time it was over that I watched all the special features. Was it left on the cutting-room floor? Did the editors deprive me of the chance to see someone blasted in the chest? It turns out no. The shotgun existed only to be photographed for the DVD cover, and nothing else.

Also, throughout the film, I was wondering where the title came from. All Hat? What does that mean? Why would you name a movie All Hat? How is that going to get people to watch, for starters, and what focus group came up with that gem? Well, it turns out that this Canadian movie was based on a book by Canadian author Brad Smith (a celebrated fiction writer, he also wrote One-Eyed Jacks, which is not to be confused with the very under-rated western directed by and starring Marlon Brando). And his book was named All Hat. And it comes from a bizarre line in the book and the film: “you’re all hat and no cattle, son”. What does that mean? Why do they think that’s a bad-ass line? Why did Keith Carradine deliver it like he was John Wayne? Why am I still watching this? Oh right, the shotgun.

There are other reasons to watch All Hat, besides the non-existent shotgun. First of all, Lisa Ray is very hot. (Her most famous role was in Deepa Mehta’s terrific Canadian-Indian film, Water.) And secondly, it is pretty short. So you won’t waste a large portion of your day. The movie begins with Ray (Luke Kirby) being released from prison and picked up by Pete (Carradine). Then there is some horse racing. We don’t know what Ray’s done to be put into prison, and it becomes pretty clear that we’re going to be told, slowly, in pieces, over the course of the film. Like it’s some kind of big revelation. But when we find out what that revelation actually is, it is…very disappointing. Also disappointing are the characters. Rachel Leigh Cook plays a jockey who is sassy and bitter and kind of a jerk. But we’re supposed to LIKE her for that! She’s a free-spirit! The bad guy, Sonny, is an absolute cartoon. He may as well spend much of the movie stroking a cat and enter each scene to the strains of Thus Spake Zarathustra.

And the big sting at the end, to nab the bad guy? Painfully unsatisfying, unless you’re really into those simplistic after-school-special movie endings. Imagine for a moment that the big gag at the end of The Sting was that Doyle Lonnegan gets a pie in the face. That’s about the level of clever we’re dealing with here. But I think it has more to do with shoddy direction than with an actual lack of cleverness to the premise. Lots of other strange stuff happens in All Hat. Every single character, almost at all times, is drinking. Beer, whiskey, from a flask, from the bar. Always. Like the Trailer Park Boys, only…serious. They all (men, and women, at convenient times) hang out at the local strip club. Small-town strip club, eh? Why would that be in the movie? Especially since there is NO nudity. Why have everyone hang out at a strip club all the time, unnecessarily, unless it’s a cheap excuse for cheap nudity? Maybe in this case it’s a cheap excuse for that expensive hooker bit.

Graham Greene shows up, just to let us know for sure that this movie is Canadian. And then - out of nowhere - there is a gross-out comedy scene, clumsily handled, as though it were out of Epic Movie or the crappier version of the Farrely Brothers. A guy gets sprayed, head to toe - with horse semen! What? Where did that come from? What movie IS this? What’s going on? Well, the answer is, not much of anything. A guy gets out of jail, his enemy is evil, Lisa Ray is gorgeous, there are horses that race, a sting is set up for the bad guy, the payoff is weak, you’re all hat and no cattle, the end. All Hat comes out May 27th, tomorrow, from Alliance Films. It’s worth skipping. You see, it’s all hat and no cattle. I think.

My memory is spotty when it comes to the first incarnation of Degrassi. Oh, I remember that Joey Jeremiah character with his funny hat, and Snake and Wheels and the hot chicks - Spike and Caitlin. And I remember I hated watching that show. Not so much because I didn’t like it, but because every single show dealt with a controversial subject and high school-age children. And after the show was over, my mom would try to get me to talk about it. “What do you think about abortion?” she would say. And I would squirm and fidget and try to escape to my room. I don’t know! I’m ten years old. I have no opinion on abortion yet. I liked the character in the show who had one, so I’m…pro-abortion? Can I go now?

Degrassi: The Next Generation, Season 6, is out on DVD May 27th from Alliance Films. And I just watched it. My recollection of the original being suspect as it is, I have no idea how this new one measures up. And perhaps my hindsight is from the perspective of a ten-year-old, and that is colouring my opinions some, but this new version of Degrassi seems watered down. And it seems more…Hollywood, I guess. For one thing, this new Degrassi stars way more hot chicks. WAY more. I think I liked the realism of the old show, in that not every girl was a knockout. It was more…real. And the one I remember, Caitlin, was just the really-hot chick in comparison. Like, a real high school.

And sure, this new Degrassi deals with the same stuff as the old one, only a little updated for today’s world. Season Six has episodes that deal with wars over girls, crippled guys trying to have sex, homosexuality, lesbianism, virginity, teen mothers, and - the modern twist - internet nudity. There is even a stabbing and a murder! But somehow this modernized version of Degrassi feels dumbed-down. Most of the actors are good, with a few exceptions, and the writing seems to be as good as ever. And so I can’t quite put my finger on what makes this new Next Generation show miss the mark. I think, and I really mean this, that it is the attractive women. Not only do most of them look too old for high school, but they also look like they come from Central Model Casting. And that gives an air of fakery to the school itself. The old Degrassi students looked like they came from, well, high school. As far as I remember.

That being said, once I put in disc one of Degrassi: The Next Generation Season Six, I had to see the second disc. And the third. I actually got into the show and wanted to see what happened next. I hardly cared about any of the characters, or their motivations or their drama, but the story lines are good and they’ll suck you in! Degrassi! Who would have thought? And I also liked the appearance of Snake from the original series, whose name in this series is … Snake. He’s now a teacher at Degrassi. Named Snake. Well, props to the old school, I suppose. A tip of the hat to that show that once rocked the world, in this one that merely rocked one Thursday afternoon for me.

Exes and Ohs is another lesbian TV series, like The L Word, running on Showcase here in Canada and on Logo in the States. It’s a standard couples and young-people-looking-for-love TV show, except that it’s all about lesbians and not straight people. It’s well-written, well-acted, and has some good characters. But it doesn’t really delve too deeply into the actual world of gay women. The world of lesbians is treated the same way the straight world is treated on regular TV. Like, if you think a woman is hot, just ask her out! OK, great, but what if she’s straight? This is the kind of thing I’d like to see explored a little more. The world of Exes and Ohs is so insular that it becomes irritating. I want to see the way these women interact and co-exist with the world around them. They hang out at lesbian parties, lesbian bowling nights, lesbian bars. So all we see are other lesbians. We don’t see any bigotry or homophobia or, really, any straight people at all.

Which makes Exes and Ohs sort of like Friends, the whitest show in the history of television, where nothing existed outside their own little circle of six people, and guest stars appeared only in order to give the main characters something to crack jokes about. And Friends got really tired, really fast. In fact, I would go so far as to say Friends sucked. Exes and Ohs is a little better, in that it has solid writing and that Canadian feel that actually works, like in Rent-A-Goalie. It stars Michelle Paradise, who also directs. She plays a character that is clearly close to herself, a documentary filmmaker. She’s the neurotic one in the bunch, the Ross-from-Friends of the lesbian world. Marnie Alton is the Joey-from-Friends character, the dirty one who sleeps with all kinds of women all the time. Heather Matarazzo plays a weirdo wannabe musician.

The best comedy in the series comes from the only two who are a consistent couple, Kris and Chris, played by Megan Cavanagh and Angela Featherstone. (Angela Featherstone, by the way, for all you nerds out there, was the girl Bruce Campbell kissed in S-Mart at the end of Army of Darkness.) They are quite funny, as basically childish and innocent idiots who have this cute and funny yet fairly stupid relationship. Like…if Phoebe and Joey got together on Friends…OK. I really have to stop thinking about Friends and more about lesbians. There are not too many TV shows like this starring all-male casts. That, I firmly believe, is because gay-man shows have only one audience - gay men. Lesbian shows have a chance at two audiences. Lesbians and straight men. Because straight men are likely to watch at least once, in the hope that they will see some hot women making out with one another. And this review wouldn’t be complete, for those guys, without at least a small discussion on that subject.

Yes, there are sex scenes. And yes, they are almost always sex scenes involving hot women. In TV world, no matter how realistic a show attempts to be, attractive people get most of the roles. And so, unlike the real world, 90 percent of the lesbians here are hot. Which, while it is unlike the real world, it is very much like the TV world. Most of these hot babes, however, seem to be there mostly as guest stars. Like Seinfeld. Only lesbian Seinfeld. And, like Seinfeld, not all of the main characters are attractive. Which is nice. Like, watching The L Word is interesting for a while, but then it seems so unrealistic where everyone is supermodel hot, that it becomes irritating. At least in something like Sex And The City, they cast Sarah Jessica Parker in the lead role. And, as Peter Griffin once said, she looks like a foot.

There are a few scenes in later episodes in Season One that break the mold a little, like when the dirty chick confronts her parents about their uncomfortable attitude toward homosexuality, and when Kris and Chris start looking for a father to inseminate one of them. But really, it’s a show that is too insular to be really compelling, and too obvious to be ground-breaking. It needs to take ON the issues, rather than just middling along as a fairly decent, well-written show. It’s nice to see shows like this getting made, and getting air time, and Exes And Ohs is not a bad program. But it would sure be nice if it (metaphorically speaking, no pun intended) grew some balls. The first season comes out on DVD on Tuesday the 20th.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a new DVD out tomorrow, May 13th, from Alliance Films. It’s not so much a movie as it is a stage play filmed like one. It’s an old 1996 staging of the Eugene O’Neill play from the Stratford Festival, directed by David Wellington and starring William Hutt, Martha Henry, Tom McCumus, Peter Donaldson, and Martha Burns. It’s the tragic and compelling story of an Irish-American family coming apart at the seams. The mother is a morphine addict, the father is a cheapskate and a drunk, one of the brothers is a degenerate alcoholic, and the other has just been diagnosed with consumption. Although this sounds like the basis of a fine and hilarious family comedy, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is anything but funny. It’s moving, it’s dramatic, but it is far from hilarious.

And perhaps it could use a little hilarity. This film is three hours long. And without some break in the drama, it starts to feel fairly monotonous at about the one-hour mark. The performances are all excellent, but they are stage-play excellent, which for film feels a lot like over-acting, in particular the scenes between the brother with consumption and his father. Over a game of cards, the dialogue gets heated, then slows to a lull, then explodes again, then fades away. I imagine that if bipolar disease is something that can be caught, this scene could give it to you. This is a wonderful play, and a great story with some super dialogue, but it seems unnecessary. Why bother putting it on film, when the entire thing happens basically within one room, and there is virtually no action at all. It ends up being three hours of talking. Interesting, intelligent talking, mind you, but still just talking. So to whom does this appeal?

I think, in the end, that this movie was put on DVD for a select few people. The theatre afficionados who can’t get out to Stratford for the big event, and the people who don’t get out to the theatre as often as they would like. So this might well fill the gap. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is one of the best-loved plays of the 20th century, but it does not make for a great movie. One hour of talking could work. Three hours is painful.

The Backyardigans are a crew of creatures that sing songs for very small children. The Backyardigans High Flying Adventures comes out tomorrow, May 13th, on DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment. It features four episodes, “Fly Girl”, “Who Goes There?”, “What’s Bugging You?”, and “Chichen-Itza Pizza”. Each episode features a certain style of music. The songs in Fly Girl are all fifties tunes (like The Wanderer), with new lyrics by the Backyardigans. What’s Bugging You features Rumba music, Who Goes There is set to flamenco, and Chichen-Itza Pizza is set to…get ready…college fight songs! This is a good way for kids to learn about history, but far be it from me to suggest that perhaps Chichen Itza and the Mexican jungle are a location that might perhaps…historically speaking…be best served with the Rumba music, while the episode about the Spiffy Spiffy club could perhaps make better use of the fight songs? Perhaps I’m thinking too much. This is, after all, a show for four-year-olds.

This bunch of creatures seems to be assembled as though they are all animals who one might find in one’s backyard. Or at least that is what the name of the group would indicate to me. However, they are a penguin, a hippo, a moose, a sheep, I think a rabbit, and another pink polka-dotted creature which might be an insect, but is more likely something created by Dr. Seuss. Like, a capblabber, or a jilskittler, or something. I can’t imagine what it really is. Again, I am thinking too much. It’s tough to write a review from the perspective of a four-year-old, it having been so long since I was one. I just know that these animals do NOT exist in my backyard. Maybe the rabbit. If that’s what it is supposed to be. Or that pink thing, if it’s supposed to be a beetle.

The animation is computer-generated, in a sort of claymation way, and it is certainly much better than the animation of similar children’s shows, like Jakers! And the Wonder Pets, which it has been my pleasure to watch and review of late. And the writing, while not as good as say, Spongebob, is better as well. Also, the music is decent, much better than Wonder Pets, but not nearly as good as the VeggieTales. All in all, the Backyardigans are middle-ground children’s fare at best. They may entertain your children just fine, but if you want to get them good stuff, you’d be better off with Spongebob or Veggie Tales.

There are a few telling scenes in the new documentary Jonas: The Quest. One is where a woman describes the effect Jonas has on an audience. She says it’s very telling when you see a guy perform on stage, and look at the crowd. If the women are excited and turned on, and the men are not pissed off, then you have a really special act. This is probably true. Then she cites some examples of rockers who have been able to pull this off, starting with Jon Bon Jovi. What?

Jonas: The Quest is a documentary from Quebec being released by Alliance Atlantis on January 15th. It’s about a Quebecois rock star named Jonas, who is searching desperately for his big break. A lot of it rings true. I have never heard of Jonas. The movie explains that it is much easier for many French Canadian artists to get their break in the U.S. than it is in Canada. I believe that. How many French Canadian musicians can most of English Canada name? Celine Dion and Roch Voisine? Mitsou? Yeah. Not exactly a proud heritage there. But there are definitely many artists labouring in Quebec that never get the mainstream recognition they deserve. But I’m not sure Jonas is one of them. There are constant comparisons to Nickelback. That’s kind of telling as well. His band is good, his voice is good, but his songs are not exactly world beaters.

Jonas: The Quest is an interesting movie, especially for those who want a real inside look at the Canadian music business. But for anyone else, there isn’t much here. None of the personalities are huge enough to be engaging, and the music itself is mediocre. Would you watch a documentary about the undiscovered Coldplay? Especially if there was no real conclusion, none of the characters were interesting, nothing really happens from beginning to end, and you have to watch a lot of Coldplay songs? I would guess no.

In 1974, Richard Dreyfuss was a relatively unknown actor. He had appeared very briefly in The Graduate, and Valley of the Dolls, and had managed to score a starring role in American Graffitti. But his first truly challenging role came as the title character in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Ted Kotcheff’s Canadian film adapted from Mordecai Richler’s classic novel. The novel itself is one that took me an awfully long time to read. I started it in high school, just like everyone else in Canada. And, just like 99 percent of the people who are forced to read certain things in school, I had no desire to read it at the time. So I read chapters one and two, and then followed along in class just barely well enough so I could fake the book report when it was done. I never read any of the rest of it. Then, about ten years later, when I was moving for about the fifth time in my life, I rediscovered all the books I had carefully avoided reading in high school. And I sat down and read them all - the two that really stuck with me were The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

In the intervening years, I have endeavoured to read as much Mordecai Richler as possible. (I highly recommend The Incomparable Atuk, an absolutely hilarious satirical tale of an “Eskimo poet”.) What I love best about Richler is his satirical style, the way he is able to turn even the sutlest of phrases to change what could be a harsh sentence into a funny one. In the movie version of Duddy Kravitz, that satire is a little tougher to find. Richler was actually nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay, and he really did do a great job adapting his novel to the screen. The movie helped to revitalize Canada’s film industry (for a time) in the 70s, and brought critical acclaim to Richard Dreyfuss. He went on to roles in Jaws, Close Encounters, and dozens of other huge movies. Kotcheff went on to direct Rambo: First Blood.

Dreyfuss really is great in Duddy Kravitz, in that he makes what is really a rather unlikeable character strangely compelling. Duddy Kravitz, both in the book and in the movie, is not a likeable human being. He does some pretty awful things to the people closest to him, but somehow the novel and this movie are both able to find some kind of humanity and sympathy for Kravitz. Randy Quaid is excellent too, in one of his first ever film roles as Duddy’s simple and suffering right-hand man Virgil. And for the first time the film is available on DVD, courtesy of Alliance Atlantis. It gets released on Tuesday, and I certainly recommend picking it up. Not for the sense of Canadiana it inspires, but for the quality of the film. Unless you’re still poisoned against it from being forced to read the novel in high school.