The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Baruchel touring Canada from his couch
With most of the nation under some degree of lockdown, a cross-country, movie-going road trip just isn't in the cards. So Jay Baruchel is taking his Twitter followers on a virtual voyage instead.
The Montreal-born actor has teamed up with film booster group Made/nous to highlight films produced in every corner of Canada. Every day of April he's been tweeting out a different movie or TV recommendation from @ Baruchelndg, including information on where it can be streamed.
“They had this initiative and they needed someone to do it with,” Baruchel says by phone from his east-end Toronto home, where he's been hunkered down these past few weeks. “Did anybody turn it down before they came to me?” He laughs: “Who knows? But for me it was a very quick yes.”
He continues: “For whoever's able to stay home right now, they're now all of a sudden with a surplus of free time. I'd be remiss if I couldn't point people to some great Canadian TV and movies they might not know exist. The concept of a virtual road trip as a way to tie it together was cool.”
The key word of course is virtual. “I did get a lot of s— from strangers who thought it was an actual road trip.” Some went so far as to issue warnings, he chuckles: “Be on the lookout for this dangerous gang of infected film nerds!”
Baruchel's road trip started in the Far North with Zacharias Kunuk's 2001 film Atanarjaut: The Fast Runner and the 2016 documentary Angry Inuk. He also suggested the 1974 slasher Black Christmas, filmed in Ontario but starring Yellowknife-born Margot Kidder.
Baruchel says he worked with the people at Made/ Nous to come up with the list. “I had some movies I thought people should see and so did Made, and some of their [stuff] wasn't on my list and vice-versa.”
One example of the latter is the Vancouver-shot drama The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open, which last year won the $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association. “I hadn't seen it, and this was a great opportunity for me to sit down and watch it, and I am so much better for it,” he says. “It's as beautiful and magical and artful a film as has come out of the English side of the country in the last 20 years.”
On the other hand, Baruchel was well acquainted with Dawson City: Frozen Time, a 2016 documentary about a cache of silent film reels discovered in an abandoned swimming pool in the Yukon. “I'm a history nerd anyway,” he says. “That film was an amazing fusing of everything I'm interested in.”
Baruchel won't reveal his choices ahead of time, but promises: “There's some weird ones coming. We don't want to just put out 30 films in the same genre. The list should be as colourful and as contradictory as any movie theatre.” And he teases that the road trip will end with an East Coast pre-confederation film that represents “the single greatest time capsule of that era in Newfoundland.”
Feedback from fans on Twitter just bolsters the list. “With every recommendation we make we get a half dozen back from people across the county,” he says. “We all want to keep finding new stuff to fall in love with.”
In addition to his acting work, Baruchel co-wrote the 2011 hockey comedy Goon, and co-wrote and directed its 2017 sequel. He also has a new film, Random Acts of Violence, which he co-wrote, directed and stars in. “It's a weird, trippy, heavy piece of slasher violence but I'm deeply proud of it,” he says.
The film had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Tex., last September. Baruchel was hoping for a release in cinemas this year, but will have to settle for videoon-demand this summer, followed by a run on U.S. horror streaming service Shudder in the fall. “There might be better years for a small movie that isn't about James Bond or Star Wars to come out,” he says mildly.
Still, he's happy to be doing his part to point people at some of our nation's other cinematic achievements. “We all know about Porky's,” he says. “But there are lots of other great stories worth shining a light on. It will never be a level playing field when people don't know the bloody things are there. No one needs to point anyone in the direction of Marvel or Game of Thrones.”