BARUCHEL TRIES HORROR
Fulfils teen dream creating Random Acts of Violence
There’s never a dull moment in a conversation with Jay Baruchel.
On the phone recently from his home in Toronto, the former Montrealer waxed passionate about his love of horror movies, our beloved Habs — of course! — and why he’s so pumped that his latest film as a writer-director, Random Acts of Violence, is in cinemas and on video-on-demand services. But it all started with a chat about ultraheavy rock band Tool.
This discussion was prompted by a tweet I’d seen just before he called, which had Baruchel, one of the funnier dudes on Twitter, writing: “Think I overestimate how much Tool my wife wants to hear in our house.”
“Well, start from the understanding that my wife likes no amount of Tool and I enjoy a great deal of it,” Baruchel said with a laugh. “So we sometimes land somewhere in the middle. It’s basically whoever is downstairs first. So if I’m in the living room and I have access to the speakers, it’s Tool o’clock until she comes down and takes over.”
Baruchel married Rebecca-jo Dunham last September in Portugal. Like most of us, they’ve been holed up at home for the most part since mid-march, but Baruchel isn’t grumbling about the confinement days of 2020.
“No complaints,” he said. “Busy, which is a good thing, and happy and healthy and nobody adversely affected by the f---ing COVID. If anything, I’ve been quite happy because I’m a homebody. So the world finally caught up to my pace.”
Anyone who knows Baruchel personally is aware the guy is a hardcore film aficionado, so it wasn’t surprising to hear that he and his wife have spent their forced stay at home watching endless movies on Apple TV. They’ve been taking turns showing each other their favourite films of all time.
Baruchel remains best known as an actor, having appeared in the movies Knocked Up, Tropic Thunder, Goon and This Is the End. But in recent years, he has been much more focused on developing his career as a writer and director. He co-wrote Goon, which was a big hit in 2012, and then co-wrote and directed the 2017 sequel, Goon: Last of the Enforcers. In 2018, he published his first book as an author, Born Into It: A Fan’s Life, a look at the Montreal Canadiens and his obsession with the team.
He wrote the second Goon film and Random Acts of Violence with his high-school buddy Jesse Chabot. The new movie, which was released Friday, is a violent horror film that could be described as a high-iq slasher film. Adapted from a 2010 graphic novel by Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti, it’s a disturbing drama about a comic-book creator named Todd (Jesse Williams) who comes up with a series of comic books based on the serial killer Slasherman.
Todd, his publisher Ezra (Baruchel), Todd’s girlfriend Kathy (Jordana Brewster) and Todd’s assistant Aurora (Niamh Wilson) head down to the area where Slasherman killed a bunch of people 20 years earlier, and things go about as badly as anyone who’s ever seen a horror film might imagine. Much blood is spilled and quite a few heads are cut off.
For Baruchel, this is a return to one of his early film loves. Chabot and Baruchel were at FACE high school together and were, in Baruchel’s words, “big horror kids.”
“We’d swap issues of Fangoria in high school,” he said. “We’d watch a lot of horror movies, then talk about a lot of horror movies, then make horror movies. So when we were given this comic book to pitch on, we were like, ‘We know this s---.’”
Random Acts of Violence raises the debate of whether it’s a good thing to exploit gory real-life crimes for entertainment purposes, but it’s a bit of a gorefest itself, so the film could be criticized for doing the very thing it’s supposed to be questioning. Kathy challenges Todd on this very point, suggesting he could be glorifying the murderer.
“We try to shine a light rather than point fingers,” said Baruchel. “I was interested in a side of the debate I wasn’t really hearing. I came of age during Columbine, and the really facile debate was: Marilyn Manson made them shoot kids they went to school with. And the rebuttal to that was: No, there’s absolutely no correlation whatsoever.
“I think it’s nonsense to blame a record for someone shooting up a high school. But I think there’s nuance that ends up being flushed down the toilet. Can you honestly say nobody has any responsibility for the messages they put out there?
“I do think we all have a responsibility for what we put out into the world. That’s common sense. If I tweet something, I should have to defend it or back it up.”
As the conversation was winding down, I told Baruchel the time had come to move on to more serious matters and asked him what he thought of the rather extraordinary development that the Canadiens, who had a middling season, were actually in these unusual COVID playoffs.
“We don’t need hockey right now, but I’ll be watching it. Of course I will be,” he said. “I think the entire thing is borderline living satire.
“The bubble cities. All of it is a bit ridiculous, because we still don’t know the makeup of this pandemic. That being said, I’ll watch every second of it.”
If the Canadiens lose their first series against the Pittsburgh Penguins, Montreal will have a 12.5 per cent chance of landing the No. 1 pick in the upcoming draft, widely expected to be much-touted 18-year-old Quebec player Alexis Lafrenière.
“Like most (Canadiens fans), I want the Habs to do well, but if inevitably we are not going to win the Cup, I would rather we fall flat on our faces as soon as possible so that we’re in on Lafrenière.”