by MALCOLM FRASER, MATTHEW HAYS and CHLOE ROUBERT

Deck the Halls

The premise of this family Christmas comedy is lifted wholesale from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, along with a million sitcom episodes and commercials: Two neighbours go head-to-head trying to outdo each other with their Christmas decorations. In this case, the rivals are upstanding community leader Steve Finch (Matthew Broderick) and his new neighbour Buddy Hall (Danny DeVito). In a shockingly bold casting move, Broderick is an uptight square and DeVito is an obnoxious boor. When DeVito tries to upset Broderick as their small town’s king of Christmas cheer, antics ensue.

The flimsy plot is padded out with the cheapest physical comedy (people falling down), by-the-book characters (Broderick’s loving wife, played by Kristin Davis, who keeps urging him to be more accepting of DeVito) and, of course, heaping doses of seasonally appropriate sentimentality. Any fleeting hints of character development are quickly swept under the rug to make room for more of the above. The presence of Alia Shawkat (aka Mabey from Arrested Development) as Broderick’s daughter offers the faint, misleading hope of subversive humour, but in the end, the only miniscule crumbs of adult content are provided by occasional, vaguely sexy behaviour from DeVito’s trashy wife Tia (Kristin Chenoweth).

Director John Whitesell, who got started in soap operas and whose most recent work is Big Momma’s House 2, steers this film in the most predictable direction all the way down the line. If you’re not a knee-jerk Scrooge when it comes to Christmas, this film might turn you into one. (MF)

Missing Victor Pellerin

In 1990, renowned Quebec artist Victor Pellerin did his best to round up all of the art he’d ever created, and then set it alight. Then he disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Or did he? In Sophie Deraspe’s feature directorial debut, the filmmaker returns to the scene of the disappearance to reconstruct the mysterious life of Pellerin, a man who is not what he seemed. Deraspe mixes elements of documentary, docudrama and mockumentary to create a complex portrait of the artist as a confused and confounding personality. Who was he? Why did he destroy his own work and then disappear? And what about the apparent art hoaxes that surround his career?

Deraspe benefits from her cast, an able and commanding ensemble who dig through the details of Pellerin’s troubled existence. Local drag fixture Plastik Patrik even makes an appearance, as does actor-director Julien Poulin (Elvis Gratton). There are some funny and unusual sequences here, with Deraspe clearly grasping the history of doc filmmaking, allowing her to flesh out her plan (I won’t spoil it for you). There are lulls in the action, but the film’s many quirks ultimately make up for them.

Missing Victor Pellerin is at its best when it skewers the local art scene, something it often does quite well. A droll bit of fusion filmmaking, a feature that clearly announces Deraspe’s arrival on the Quebec film scene. (MH)

Tupperware

Quite incredibly, 48 years after the first Tupperware Home Party, hosting your own might just be the latest, coolest way to be a rewarded feminist. Tupperware’s particular sales approach, restricting their vending to direct-sales demonstrations, enabled women to stay in their kitchens to watch over the kids while making money, and additionally becoming ideal homemakers by Tupperizing their homes (in other words, storing everything in Tupperware products). While this scheme might have sounded great at a time when women couldn’t enter university, wear pants, vote or pay for a cleaning lady, the question is how in the world can anyone be satisfied selling plastic boxes from their kitchen six years into the 21st century?

To find possible answers, Tupperware investigates the lives of a few Quebec Tupperware consultants over the course of a year. Interestingly, as we witness their reward package parties, and sit in on their “how to be a better wife” classes, we realize that in this group there is a direct correlation between your social confidence, familial happiness and self-worth and how many Shape-Os, Kimchi Keepers, TupperWave Stack Cookers, Microsteamers, Modular Mates and Dip ’N Serve Serving Trays you can sell. It’s funny, but it also questions our general social presumptions that heavy hierarchal structures, reward systems, biased coaches and financial satisfaction can’t be a positive influence on people’s deep sense of self. An amusing, interesting and surprising little doc from Quebec. (CR)

All films open this Friday, Nov. 24

>> Movie Listings