by MARK SLUTSKY

Fetching Cody

A Canadian time-travel love story about a pair of loveable junkie hustlers in Vancouver’s seedy downtown, Fetching Cody is exactly as misguided and painfully “quirky” as it sounds. Jay Baruchel plays Art, a fast-talking, drug-addicted street kid in love with fellow junkie hustler Cody (Sarah Lind). When Cody goes into a coma due to an overdose combined with the ravages of some unnamed disease she picked up on the street (you’d think in 2006 filmmakers wouldn’t be shy about naming it: AIDS, but what can you do?), Art goes back in time via a magical old overstuffed armchair to try and correct the wrongs in her life that led Cody down the path to badness. Of course his methods don’t always work out, resulting in multiple trips to the same time period and lots of whimsical trial and error.

Think The Butterfly Effect or Groundhog Day, only set in the delightful world of Vancouver’s skid row, populated with the kind of unfortunate colourful characters that filmmakers seem to think represent poor people: soulful drag queens, prophetic old homeless men and various other beautiful losers. Baruchel was great in Judd Apatow’s sadly cancelled college sitcom Undeclared, but why he plays his character as Ratso Rizzo in a hoodie is anyone’s guess, and both he and Lind are far too fresh-faced and healthy-looking to play long-time drug addicts and prostitutes.

The War Within

Hassan, an engineering student in Paris, is pulled off the street abruptly one day by American operatives and shipped off to Karachi, where he’s imprisoned, suspected by unnamed authorities of being involved in international Islamic terrorism, and tortured. Their suspicions prove incorrect, but the horrifying experience swiftly radicalizes the young man, and three years later he’s smuggling himself into the United States in a freight container, where he plans to meet up with fellow conspirators and execute an attack on New York City.

Rather than being the villain of The War Within, Hassan, very well-played by the film’s co-writer Ayad Akhtar, is its uneasy protagonist. He’s a man who undergoes a crisis of conscience after he moves in with his best friend’s family—all of whom are content in their immigrant life and oblivious to his terrorist activities.

Directed by Joseph Castelo, The War Within is an absorbing character study, mostly held up by very good performances but marred a little by some unfortunate soap operatics. It’s reminiscent of a similar (and better) film, Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist, which appeared two years before 9/11 and was largely overlooked. Both films follow a suicide bomber’s struggle with an inevitable violent act, and both are really worth seeing despite their flaws.

Lucid

In Sean Garrity’s psycho-thriller, therapist Dr. Joel Rothman (co-writer Jonas Chernick) is... well, he’s in trouble, and that’s the only really clear thing we know about him—besides the fact that his wife and daughter have recently caught him in bed with another woman. That, and the fact that he can’t sleep.

Otherwise, all bets are off. He appears to be leading a therapy session with three troubled souls (Callum Keith Rennie, Michelle Nolden and Lindy Booth), but there are so many strange things going on—he sees copies, or “repeaters” of them everywhere, for instance—that clearly we’re not seeing the whole picture. He’s also on the hook with the company that employs him, who want to move him and his daughter to Gimli (from Winnipeg). So Rothman frantically puts off discharging his patients, as that’ll mean he has no excuse not to leave.

As he goes crazier and crazier from lack of sleep, his patients seem to increase in hysteria as well, until it becomes very obvious that at least some of what’s going on is entirely in his, or someone else’s, head. But the problem with Lucid is that since we never at any point know what is real or not, it’s hard to get invested in the story or any of its characters at all, especially as it’s somewhat lacking in atmosphere.

The omnipresent, irritatingly jaunty soundtrack music, so common to Canadian films, doesn’t help either. And when the movie does show its hand, it’s to reveal what appears to be plot points stuck together from other, better movies.

Fetching Cody, Lucid and The War Within open Friday, June 2

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