by CHRIS BARRY, JOANNE LATIMER,
SARAH ROWLAND and MARK SLUTSKY

Littoral

When it comes time to review a locally produced film, one generally wants to give it the benefit of the doubt and try to find something redeeming within it rather than rip it to shreds entirely. It's kind of like a "support our troops" thing. So let me say this about local director Wajdi Mouawad's Littoral: there's a fair amount of thoroughly uncalled for nudity in it. Thumbs up.

Second positive point: much of this gratuitous nudity takes place in the stunningly beautiful Lebanon countryside. So when you feel like crying because the film is so boring and you're professionally obliged to sit through all 86 minutes of it, you can focus on the trees in the background. Littoral is the story of a jeune Québécois who steals his father's corpse from a funeral home so he can bury it in his native Lebanon. Yet for a variety of unconvincing reasons nobody wants to give him a burial plot. Why this task is so important to him is vague, especially since he never knew his papa in the living years. But it's safe to assume the answer lies within at least one of the many "deep" metaphors scattered throughout the film. (CB)

Immortel

Wow, this is a weird one. Competing with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for the title of First Movie Where All the Acting Takes Place in Front of a Green Screen, Immortel is so overwhelmingly computer-generated, it's pretty much a cartoon.

Based on a French graphic novel by writer/director Enki Bilal, Immortel is about… well, it's about a pyramid floating above future New York… and the god Horus, who is sentenced to death… and a girl with blue hair… and Charlotte Rampling is hanging around… and there's something about eugenics and some mutants and something. Uh, okay, I have no idea what this movie was about. But for the most part, it was pretty cool-looking, yet awful-looking at the same time. Not only are the backgrounds entirely CGI, a lot of the characters are too, humans included, which sometimes gives the impression that you're watching a really long scene between levels in a PlayStation game. Overall, it feels like an issue of a comic book series somewhere in the middle of its run when you haven't read the previous issues. (MS)

Japanese Story

After every bite of barbi, Sandy licks her greasy fingers clean. Before Tachibana sits down for a plate of sushi, he sterilizes his hands with a boiling hot cloth. Sandy can chug-a-lug a pint down in seconds flat, where as Tachibana gets drunk on two beers. Yes, the cultural disparities between Australian women and Japanese men are endless.

But director Sue Brooks doesn't limit herself to celebrating the differences in her award-winning romantic drama from Down Under. Sandy (Toni Collette) is a middle-aged geologist who is forced to chaperone a potential investor Tachibana (Gotaro Tsunashima) on a sightseeing tour through the Pilbara desert. They're not off to a good start. The large-boned blonde unintentionally traumatizes him by offering a hearty handshake, leaving his bowed head suspended in mid air. But soon after, the two lonely souls find comfort in sharing their ethnic idiosyncrasies as they traverse the vast and beautiful landscape. Both leads are stellar and Brooks doesn't overcomplicate her love story with extraneous subplots. It's just two people connecting on a level that makes them forget how much their lives suck back home. (SR)

Some Things That Stay

Based on a novel by Sarah Willis, this Gail Harvey film follows the tribulations of a teenage girl whose British artist father (Stuart Wilson) and free-thinking mother (Alberta Watson) drag their three kids across North America. The family moves every year, becoming professional nomads and outcasts as atheists in Christian territory. Tamara (Katie Boland) is a sneering teenager, dealing with a haunted bedroom, the cute boy next door, Bible-thumping neighbours and barnyard animals. Everything comes unglued with Tamara's mother gets TB, and Tamara's resentment boils over when her mom goes to recuperate in a hospital and her father skips town to see his agent in New York.

For a complicated adolescent, Tamara is surprisingly boring. Other than an episode of skinny-dipping and letting the boy next door take her shirt off, very little happens. (JL)

CQ2

CQ2 is a chick flick, no doubt about it. But as these things go, writer/director Carole Laure manages to tell a fairly compelling story of one damaged teen's journey through adolescence into womanhood. Laure's daughter Clara Furey stars as a sullen young woman who latches on to enigmatic modern dance instructor/ex-con Danielle Hubbard and is subsequently taught not only how to dance, but how to live and love in this crazy place we call the world. And while CQ2 gets hokey at times and heartily reeks of 1970s St-Denis Street Québécois hippie sensibilities, underneath it all lies a relatively accomplished film. Furey is a pleasure to watch as she acts and dances up a storm, demonstrating that she's more than simply the lucky beneficiary of nepotism. However, I honestly couldn't recommend CQ2 to any of my male friends - straight or gay - unless I was secretly angry at them. (CB)

Littoral, Immortel, Japanese Story, Some Things That Stay and CQ2 open Friday, Nov. 5

>> Movie Listings