Kid Cannabis should please target audience
Kid Cannabis: “Mini-Scarface” is how one person described the reallife case that inspired Kid Cannabis, a new drama that hits theatres in the U.S. and Canada this weekend. That’s a handy summary for the movie, too, which does indeed play out like a variation on Brian De Palma’s 1983 classic of sleaze, bloodshed and drugfuelled excess except with Tony Montana replaced by a pimply and portly 19-year-old high school dropout from Washington State.
Played here by Jonathan Daniel Brown, Nate Norman was a run-ofthe-mill stoner and pizza delivery boy who landed upon a scheme to use his buddies to smuggle enormous amounts of B.C. bud across the U.S. border.
They earned millions of dollars and partied like rock stars before the murder of a rival dealer brought the wrath of the authorities down upon their operation. (Veteran character actor Ron Perlman oozes his usual mixture of menace and bravado as Norman’s money man.)
Though keen to highlight the hy- pocrisies and paradoxes of the marijuana business on both sides of the border, director John Stockwell presents Norman’s saga as a parable about youthful ambition and pot-addled stupidity. And while the story is too slight and the execution too scattershot for Kid Cannabis to really merit the Scarface comparisons, Stockwell’s film should do just fine with its target audience. It’s no coincidence that the movie’s been released in time for April 20, a much-venerated date on the counterculture calendar. Kid Cannabis begins its Toronto run at the Royal on April 18. That Demon Within: Eerie stories of evil spirits and action-packed dramas about cops and robbers have long been strong suits for Hong Kong’s film talent. Director Dante Lam somehow finds room for both in the same movie with That Demon Within, a grisly and gripping thriller about a taciturn police officer whose fate becomes intertwined with that of a ruthless gang leader after an illfated blood transfusion. Fresh from its premiere at the Berlin festival, That Demon Within opens for a local run at the Cineplex Odeon Yonge-Dundas and Rainbow Cinema Elgin Mills on April 18. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq: Muse and lover to George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, Tanaquil Le Clercq was a legend of the dance world for her achievements on stage as well as the teaching career that followed the premature end of her performing career due to polio. Director Nancy Buirski recounts the ballerina’s tumultuous history in a new documentary that makes exquisite use of rare archival footage. Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq opens April 18 at the Bloor. Michel Brault: With the passing of Québécois filmmaker Michel Brault last September while en route to a film festival in Huntsville, Canadian cinema lost one of its true giants. TIFF celebrates his formidable oeuvre with a Lightbox retrospective. Selections include 1963’s Pour la suite du monde (April 19 at 8 p.m.), a pioneering work of cinéma-vérité that he made with fellow great Pierre Perrault, and Francis Mankiewicz’s 1979 drama Les bons débarras (April 20 at 5 p.m.), a showcase of Brault’s prowess as a cinematographer.
The series runs to April 22. David Lynch in Nayman’s terms: Local critic and author of the indispensable Showgirls study It Doesn’t Suck (now out on ECW Press), Adam Nayman presents a new Mondaynight lecture series at the Miles Nadal JCC on David Lynch. Over the course of eight weeks, patrons are invited to scrutinize the American director’s career from his earliest shorts and 1977 cult hit Eraserhead through to 2006’s brilliant and baffling Inland Empire.
The session starts April 28 at 7 p.m. and costs $90 for the full series or $12 for drop-in classes ($6 for TJFS subscribers and students). jandersonesque@gmail.com