Popular bricks and mysterious lettuce
A LEGO Brickumentary
(out of 4) Narrated by Jason Bateman, directed by Kief Davidson and Daniel Junge. 95 minutes. At TIFF Bell Lightbox. G
AFOL (adult fans of Lego), KFOL (kid fans of LEGO) and every blockhead in between will click with this upbeat doc about one of the world’s most beloved toys.
It’s hard not to see it occasionally as an extended commercial. And every time we hear someone exclaim “Awesome!” The LEGO Movie springs to mind. Of course, the movie figures in doc.
But there’s a huge world beyond store shelves as Brickumentary explores master builders, artists and creative minds that ensure you’ll never look at these little pieces of plastic the same way.
Narrated by Jason Bateman as a mini-figure acting as glib guide, the movie opens with a stop-motion backstory explaining how a Danish wooden toymaker grew to a $4-billion business. But the brass at Denmark’s head office also admit to failings; the company lost its way in 2003 by backing prefab figures rather than build-ityourself toys.
While enjoyable to get caught up in Alice Finch’s sublime replica of Rivendell from The Lord of the Rings (along with her girl-power message for female builders) or the mechanics behind making a life-size Lego Star Wars X-Wing starfighter, there is also a powerful message about the helpful role the plastic pieces have in the lives of students with autism. Linda Barnard
Man From Reno
(out of 4) Starring Ayako Fujitani, Pepe Serna and Kazuki Kitamura. Directed by Dave Boyle. Starts Saturday at the Royal. 111 minutes. R
A phone number in a matchbook is the type of clue found in routine gumshoe dramas, but a mysterious head of lettuce and rare baby turtles in a toilet tank aren’t.
Writer/director Dave Boyle’s neo-noir thriller Man From Reno shuttles between the familiar and the strange. It nods to noir classics (Richard Wong provides the moody cinematography) while also striking into weirder head spaces. This bicultural detective tale, a prize winner at the most recent L.A. Film Festival, is more of a simmering pot than a boiling one.
Popular Japanese crime novelist Aki (Ayako Fujitani) thinks she’s just taking a break from her busy concerns when she flees a publicity tour to get some downtime in her San Francisco hotel room. But the charmer she meets in her hotel’s bar (Kazuki Kitamura) soon ends up in her bed and then on her agitated mind, when he mysteriously disappears, leaving behind his luggage and the aforementioned lettuce.
Meanwhile, local county Sheriff Paul Del Moral, played by great character actor Pepe Serna, has his own bizarre missing-man case: the sharp-dressed wanderer he hit with his car on a foggy night drive who later vanishes from hospital. The paths of Aki and Sheriff Paul are bound to cross, and they do, in a story that yields its secrets slowly but sinuously, making the most of its language and cultural differences. Peter Howell