Forced to be a teenager again and again
Before I Fall
(out of 4) Starring Zoey Deutch, Halston Sage, Cynthy Wu, Elena Kampouris, Logan Miller, Kian Lawley, Diego Boneta and Jennifer Beals. Directed by Ry RussoYoung. Opens Friday at major theatres. 98 minutes. 14A Before I Fall might have been dismissed — and even forgiven — for falling into a Groundhog Day rut, since it deliberately goes in for a similar story of redemptive magic. Who expects much from movies such as these, especially one targeted at teens? Yet this one avoids tedium and exceeds expectations.
At the risk of overstatement, a fairer film comparison might be Rashomon, for the many angles and perspectives Before I Fall provides on a single subject: a teen girl on the cusp of adulthood, with attendant life challenges both comic and tragic.
Director Ry Russo-Young ( Nobody Walks) is no Kurosawa but she certainly knows her film classics, also working in sly reference to Blade Runner and The Shining. Maria Maggenti adapted her bittersweet screenplay from the popular young adult novel by Lauren Oliver.
It’s “Cupid Day” at the Pacific Northwest high school of popular student Sam Kingston ( Vampire Academy’s Zoey Deutch). Sam plans to celebrate this pre-Valentine’s Day occasion by partying with her funloving gal pals — Lindsay (Halston Sage), Ally (Cynthy Wu) and Elody (Medalion Rahimi) — while also losing her virginity with her erstwhile boyfriend Rob (Kian Lawley).
Frozen out of the cool zone are earnest nerd Kent (Logan Miller), who has a secret crush on Sam, and school “psycho” Juliet (Elena Kampouris), who is bullied just for being different.
The day will actually turn out to be even more complicated than Sam planned.
Something happens — she’s not sure what exactly — that has her reliving Cupid Day over and over, but also with the power to make small and possibly significant changes.
“Don’t go emo on us,” somebody says, and thankfully the film doesn’t. A fine actress, Deutch makes a compelling and empathetic protagonist, even as the story veers closer into the supernatural.
Neither does it go overboard for the usual teen movie hijinks — the mood is frequently as dark as the lens of Michael Fimognari, who puts his horror film experience to good work. Also opening: George Mendeluk’s Bitter Harvest, a historical drama set in 1930s Soviet Ukraine, at Cineplex Yonge-Dundas. Peter Howell Like good Vietnamese cuisine, Saigon Bodyguards is pho fresh and hot.
Director Ken Ochiai delivers a fond homage to the Western buddy action/comedy, and while it’s by no means perfect, it’s still madcap fun with a cheeky sense of humour right down to such zingers as “What the phuc!” Kim Ly and Thai Hoa play two bodyguards charged with protecting Henry, returning home from Harvard to take up the mantle of his recently deceased milk tycoon father. When Henry is kidnapped by a villainous brother and sister, the partners find a doppelganger named Phuc to act as substitute until an all-important board meeting.
Kim, the eye-candy half of the partnership, bears a resemblance of sorts to American action star Dwayne Johnson right down to the mannerisms and toned body (though not quite of Rock-ian proportions).
Thai provides the comic relief and he’s funny in a buffoonish way.
There’s a hip Asian fusion soundtrack and Ochiai delivers some decent fight-scene action without ever taking things too seriously. Bruce DeMara Devout Christians will flock to The Shack. For the rest of us, it may require an act of faith.
“Who wouldn’t be skeptical when a man claims to have spent an entire weekend with God in a shack?” goes the prologue. Who indeed?
Sam Worthington plays Mack, visited by a “great sadness” when his daughter is abducted during a camping trip and murdered at a tumbledown house in the woods.
A mysterious letter draws Mack back to the place where his faith has been so sorely tested where he meets God (played by Octavia Spencer), Jesus and a woman named Sarayu (the holy ghost possibly?).
Worthington delivers a solid performance as the grieving dad and country music singer Tim McGraw, sporting a Christian cool beard, has a nice cameo as a sympathetic neighbour.
The story deals with a fundamental question: how to forgive a crime of such abominable proportions?
But at more than two hours, the film is too long and the storyline too faith-infused to be truly redemptive for a broader audience. BD Eloise (Anna Kendrick) shows up at a friend’s wedding for reasons to be unwrapped later. The recently dumped girlfriend of the bride’s brother, she lands with the “randoms” near the back of the room where, as one guest notes, you can smell the toilets.
Her tablemates include a squabbling couple, the bride’s nanny, an awkward teenager and an ex-con relation (Stephen Merchant, a delight). As the reception progresses, complete with a cake in an unfortunate location and a scruffy dog that is never quite explained, Eloise’s misfit accomplices soon have her back after we learn why she’s at the wedding.
If director Jeffrey Blitz ( Rocket Science) and story creators Jay and Mark Duplass had worked harder to heat up this lukewarm buffet dish of a film, Table 19 might have found a surer berth in the frothy wedding genre. Instead, it feels a bit like an unfocused drunk-uncle speech; it’s got a couple of good jokes, but mostly you just wait it out to get to the inevitable sweet table at the end of the night. Kathryn Laskaris Small-town French orphans with big Paris dreams learn the unexpected cost of ambition in Ballerina, a Canada-France animation.
There’s plenty of visual whimsy in the late-19th-century setting — the animators render a gorgeous Paris — while enthusiastic dance sequences and comic beats balance out melodrama.
Ballerina trips over its own feet occasionally, not sure what sort of tale it wants to tell. But the voice talents of Elle Fanning as aspiring ballerina Félicie and Dane DeHaan as her invention-designing pal Victor, help the characters seem less waxily artificial than computer-generated animation makes them appear.
Poppy tunes from Sia and Carly Rae Jepsen (who also voices Odette, a housemaid with a secret) weave throughout after Félicie and Victor escape their orphanage home to see what Paris can offer them. Independent Félicie longs to train as a dancer at the Paris Opera and Victor itches to get his latest invention aloft. He’s determined to watch out for Félicie, especially when she has her head turned by a preening Russian. Linda Barnard