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Film Review: KIMI (dir by Steven Soderbergh)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

KIMI, the latest addition to Steven Soderbergh’s interesting but frustratingly inconsistent filmography, stars Zoe Kravitz as Angela Childs.  Angela is an agoraphobic tech worker who is living in Seattle during the COVID pandemic.  A sexual assault survivor, Angela spends her days and nights safely locked away in her apartment.  She works from home.  She always keeps her mask some place near.  Occasionally, she’ll have a video session with her therapist.  Her mom calls and scolds her for not going outside.  She exchanges texts and occasionally more with Terry Hughes (Byron Bowers), an attorney who lives across the street.

And, she’s watched by Kevin (Devin Ratray).  Kevin also lives across the street and, throughout the film, he’s occasionally seen watching her from his top floor apartment.  It’s creepy but it’s not surprising.  KIMI is a film in which everyone is being watched by someone else.  Sometimes, they realize it and often they don’t.  Welcome to the Surveillance State, where privacy is the ultimate illusion.

Angela works for the Amygdala Corporation.  Under the leadership of CEO Bradley Hasling (Derek DelGuado), Amygdala has created KIMI, the virtual assistant that is superior to Alexa because all of KIMI’s errors are corrected not by a pre-programmed algorithm but instead by human workers who are constantly listening to KIMI’s data stream and correcting errors.  Angela is one of those engineers.  Usually, her job consists of programming KIMIs to play individual Taylor Swift songs as opposed to building Taylor Swift playlists.  When one owner calls KIMI a peckerwood, Angela programs the KIMI to understand that peckerwood is an “insult; vulgar.”  However, one data stream contains the sounds of what Angela believes to be a sexual assault and a subsequent murder.

Uniquely, for a film like this, Angela’s struggle is not to get people to believe that she heard what she heard.  Instead, her struggle is to get the evidence to the people who need to hear it for themselves.  Angela is terrified of leaving her apartment and, once she finally does, the outside world confirms all of her fears.  KIMI is a film about paranoia, a portrait of a world where everyone can be tracked and no one — from Angela’s too-helpful boss (Rita Wilson) to the man who casually walks by with an umbrella — can be trusted.

As I’ve said in the past, Steven Soderbergh has always been hit and miss for me.  It’s remarkable how many Soderbergh films that I love but it’s equally remarkable just how many Soderbergh films I absolutely loathe.  At his best, he can be a clever stylist and, at his worst, he can be painfully pretentious.  And yet, regardless of anything else, you do have to respect Soderbergh’s willingness to experiment with different genres and styles.  Soderbergh never stops working, despite the fact that he announced his retirement years ago.  Despite getting off to a slow start, KIMI is one of Soderbergh’s more entertaining thrillers, one that does a great job creating an atmosphere of paranoia and one that is also blessed with excellent performances from Zoe Kravitz and Rita Wilson, who makes good use of her limited screen time.  KIMI is a well-made Hitchcockian thriller and, along with No Sudden Move, it’s a return to form for Soderbergh after the two terrible movies that he made with Meryl Streep, The Laundromat and Let Them All Talk.  Yes, Soderbergh can be inconsistent but when he’s good …. he’s very, very good.  (Sometimes, he’s even brilliant.)  Narratively, KIMI may be a relatively simple film by Soderbergh standards but it’s undeniably effective.

Along with being a portrait of our paranoid age, KIMI is very much a pandemic thriller.  Angela mentions that her relationship with Terry started during the lockdowns, a time when no one found it strange that someone would be unwilling to leave their apartment.  When Angela does finally step out of her apartment, she is, of course, fully masked up and her paranoia about being followed severs as a metaphor for the paranoia that many people felt (and continue to feel) during the pandemic.  KIMI is not the first pandemic thriller and it certainly won’t be the last.  Still, what’s interesting to me that the pandemic subtext will probably be more noticeable to those who lived in states with mask mandates and aggressively regulated lockdowns than it will be for those of us who live in states that never had mandates and which, for lack of a better term, re-opened last year.  Half the people viewing KIMI will nod in recognition as Angela grabs her mask before walking up to her front door and as she quickly dashes down the street, careful not get too close to anyone else.  The other half will feel as if they’re watching some sort of dystopian science fiction film.  It all depends on where you’ve lived for the past two years.

Music Video of the Day: Let Somebody Go by Coldplay and Selena Gomez (2022, dir by Dave Meyers)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh, the goodbye hug.  The tearful break-up.  The understanding farewell.  The moment when you watch someone walk away and it becomes clear that the two of you will probably never see each other again.  We’ve all been through that type of pain and, more often than not, when we remember the moment, we remember it as being in black-and-white.  Selena Gomez was the perfect choice for this song, bringing truthful sadness and emotion to the lyrics.  

This video was directed by Dave Meyers.  Dave Meyers has directed a lot of videos.  How many Dave Meyers videos have we shared on this site?  I don’t know, I’ve lost track.  Whatever it is that it takes to make someone into a good music video director, Dave Meyers definitely has it.  This, of course, is actually the second video for this song.  The first video has a sort of sci-fi feel to it.  I prefer Meyers’s more emotional approach.

Remember when Selena Gomez shows up in The Big Short and explained how some sort of stock market concept worked.  And some old lady said, “I like Selena Gomez, I’ll invest in whatever she’s investing in.”  That was a weird scene and I have to admit that I still have no idea how the stock market works.

I usually don’t follow or comment on celebrity gossip because I find it to be tacky but I was happy when Chris Martin divorced Gwyneth Paltrow.  I was concerned that she was using all of his Coldplay money to invest in making candles.  I will admit that I kind of pictured the “Dinner Party” episode of The Office whenever I imagined what it was like to visit Chris and Gwyneth.  “Hey, babe? How about we take the beer sign down until our guests leave and then we can discuss it.”

Anyway, enjoy!

We had that kind of love
I thought that it would never end
Oh, my lover, oh, my other, oh, my friend
We talked around in circles and
We talked around and then
I loved you to the moon and back again
You gave everything this golden glow
Now turn off all the stars ’cause this I know
That it hurts like so
To let somebody go
All the storms we weathered
Everything that we went through
Now, without you, what on earth am I to do?
When I called the mathematicians and I ask them to explain
They said love is only equal to the pain
And when everything was going wrong
You could turn my sorrow into song
Oh, it hurts like so
To let somebody go
To let somebody go
Oh-oh (oh-oh)
Oh-oh
(Let somebody, let somebody go) yeah
Oh, oh-oh (oh), when you love somebody (oh)
When you love somebody (oh)
Got to let somebody know
Oh, oh-oh (oh), when you love somebody (oh)
When you love somebody (oh)
Got to let somebody know
So, when you love somebody
When you love somebody
Then it hurts like so
To let somebody go
It hurts like so
To let somebody go
But you’re still with me, now I know
(Let somebody, let somebody go)
Oh-oh (let somebody, let somebody go)
But you’re still with me, now I know

Film Review: Shut In (dir by DJ Caruso)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Shut In is not a political movie.

It’s important to point that out because much of the online reaction to Shut In will be totally political.  That’s because it’s the second film to have been produced by The Daily Wire.  And yes, Ben Shapiro is listed as one of the film’s producers.  For many, it doesn’t matter that the film’s script appeared on The Black List of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood.  (Of course, some notoriously terrible movies have been made out of the scripts that appeared on The Blacklist — remember Cedar Rapids? — so maybe it’d be best not to call too much attention to that.)  It won’t matter that the script was initially purchased by a major studio or that Jason Bateman (who is hardly a right-wing media figure) was originally set to direct it before the project was delayed by the pandemic.  All that will matter is that the film was produced by the Daily Wire and therefore, it will be judged as being some sort of political statement.

Indeed, when the film’s premiere was streamed on YouTube earlier tonight, I kept one eye on the movie and another eye on the chat comments.  About 80% of them were from people saying, “Let’s go Brandon!”  18% were from people saying, “Biden 2024 Harris 2028.”  And 2% of the comments were from some group of weirdoes who were obsessed with Liz Cheney.  The film itself might not be political but the film’s audience definitely was and probably will continue to be so.  I imagine most hardcore online liberals will automatically hate the film because of who produced it while most hardcore online conservatives will be tempted to overpraise it and cite it as proof that a good film can be made outside of the Hollywood system.  It’s tempting to say that’s just the way of the world nowadays but, to be honest, it’s really just the way of the extremely online world.  Most people won’t care one way or the other.  They’ll just view it as a being an effective thriller.

And, make not doubt about it, Shut In is not a bad film.  It’s an effectively tense thriller, one that has plenty of suspense and which makes good use of its limited budget.  If it’s never quite a great film, that’s because there’s a few pacing and plausibility issues, especially early on in the film.

Shut In stars Rainey Qualley as Jessica, a former dug addict who has escaped from her abusive ex and who is now trying to start a new life, with her young daughter and her newborn son, in an isolated farmhouse.  Unfortunately, when her ex, Rob (Jake Horowitz), and his scummy friend, Sammy (Indie film legend Vincent Gallo, making his first film appearance in ten years), show up at the house, Jessica ends up getting locked in the pantry while Rob and Sammy ransack the house and, most importantly, steal her phone so she can’t call for help.  Trapped in the pantry, Jessica tries to figure out a way to escape while also trying to instruct her young daughter on how to take care of her baby brother.  The whole time, of course, she’s aware that Sammy and Rob could return at any minute.

Director D.J. Caruso does a good job of building and maintaining tension throughout the film.  The majority of the film’s action takes place in that pantry and, just like Jessica, we find ourselves forced to try to interpret the sometimes random footsteps and snippets of conversation that we hear throughout the house.  Rainey Qualley, who is the daughter of Andie MacDowell and who has a Southern accent that is almost as prominent as her mother’s, is sympathetic in the role of Jessica and does a good job of playing up not only her fear but her strength.  Jessica is a survivor and it’s difficult not to admire her as she searches for a way to escape.  Vincent Gallo is older but still as uniquely photogenic as he was during his indie heyday.  He’s memorably creepy as Sammy.

As I said, it’s not a flawless film.  It takes a while for things to really get going and, towards the end of the film, a few of the characters behave in ways that defy logic.  One key moment depends on a character surviving something that, by all logic, should have easily killed them.  It may not be a political film but there are a few bits of heavy-handed religious symbolism, including an injury that deliberately calls to mind stigmata.  That said, when Jessica finally begins to fight back, it’s an enjoyably cathartic moment.

Shut In is an effective thriller and a determinedly non-political one.  If nothing else, it’ll keep you out of the pantry.

International Film Review: Into the Wind (dir by Kristofer Rus)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ania (Sonia Mietielica) is the privileged daughter of a wealthy doctor.  She’s graduated from an exclusive high school in Warsaw and now, she’s about to start studying medicine in London.  The plan is that she’ll eventually take over her father’s medical practice and that she will, of course, marry someone from her upper class social circle.  Ania is haunted by the death of her artist mother and still struggles to get along with her stepmother (Sonia Bohosiewicz).

Michal (Jakub Sasak) is a handsome but poor athlete who works at the local beach resort.  At night, he’s a waiter.  During the day, he’s a kitesurfing instructor.  He may not have money or an education but he’s sensitive and artistic.  He likes good music, good weed, and hanging out good people.  He’s laid back but he cares about his friends and he’s got a romantic soul.

Together …. they solve crimes!

No, actually, they don’t.  There are no crimes to be solved in Into The Wind.  Instead, they meet when Ania accompanies her father, her stepmother, and her new baby brother to the resort for the summer.  While Ania listens to her father talk about how the pandemic has not really effected his practice (this is a 2022 film so, of course, there is talk of COVID in the background), Michal serves food and wine and is largely unseen by the other guests.  (The wait staff, as he explains it, is meant to be invisible.)  However, Ania sees him and he sees her.  And soon, they’re in love, they’re hanging out on the beach, they’re listening to music, and they’re kitesurfing!  But they’re also from two different worlds.  Ania’s father does not want his daughter to end up with a waiter.  And Michal’s friends are convinced that Ania will eventually return to her safe, upper class existence and Michal will be left heart-broken.

This Polish film is narratively predictable but visually stylish.  The plot should be familiar to anyone who has ever seen Dirty Dancing but then again, it’s not exactly as if Dirty Dancing was the most original film ever made.  That said, though the plot may be predictable, the film has enough lovely shots of the beach and the two leads have more than enough romantic chemistry to keep things watchable.  This is a good film to watch after a long and exhausting day, when you just want a simple story, a happy ending, and some nice pictures to go along with it.  Speaking for myself, as someone who spent last week dealing with below freezing temperatures and ice on the ground, the beach and the ocean looked very inviting and, for that matter, so did Jakub Sasak.  The beach and the cast are pretty and that’s pretty much all that a film like this really needs to work.

That said, I did really like the Kitesurfing scenes.  Kitesurfing is something that I personally would never do, seeing as how it would mean confronting not only my fear of drowning but also, potentially, my fear of heights but, even with that in mind, the film still made it a look like something that everyone should try at least once.  The scenes of people skimming across and occasionally floating above the water take on an almost religious grandeur as the surfer becomes onr with the forces of nature and fate.  Those scenes are exciting to watch, even if the story taking place around them is thoroughly predictable.

TV Review: Pam & Tommy 1.4 “The Master Beta” (dir by Lake Bell)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

“I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

That was my thought after I published my review of the first three episodes of Pam & Tommy.  Don’t get me wrong.  I stand by everything that I wrote in that review.  The first three episodes were relatively well-made and they captured as specific point in time and Lily James was likably earnest as Pam.

Instead, my concern came from the fact that, by reviewing the first three episodes, I had now committed myself to watching and reviewing the entire series.  And, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was no way that Pam & Tommy could remain interesting for a total of 8 hours, not unless the show abandoned its Ryan Murphy-lite approach and did something really unexpected with its recreation of the story.  There’s just not enough there.  This is a good 2-hour story but Pam & Tommy is an 8-epiosde miniseries.  That’s 8-plus hours of Pam getting upset, Tommy acting like a dumbass, and Rand being every creepy guy who has ever approached you in a bar and started asking you about the book you’re reading.  (It would, of course, never occur to him that the main reason you’re reading the book is to avoid talking to guys like him.)

Having now watched the fourth episode, it’s hard not to feel that I was very much correct in my concerns.  Don’t get me wrong.  The fourth episode had its moments.  It featured an enjoyably intense performance from Don Harvey as the legendary Hollywood private investigator, Anthony Pellicano.  Once Tommy finally discovers that his safe has been stolen and Pam reminds him about the videotape, Pellicano is the man who they approach to track down the perpetrator.  This leads to a scene of Pellicano beating the crap out of Rand and it’s fun to watch.  Some of that is because Don Harvey is a master of portraying urbane menace.  But I have to admit that a lot of it is because Rand himself is such an annoying character.  This episode opened with Seth Rogen, as Rand, wandering around a porn set and trying to reconnect with his estranged wife (Taylor Schilling), who significantly was just trying to read Anne Rice’s latest book when he approached her.  Just the sight of Rand, with his mullet and his sad-sack facial expression, was so annoying that it was actually cathartic to see him get tossed around his apartment.

The problem is that the show wants us to feel some sympathy for Rand but there’s nothing sympathetic about him.  He’s a loser and the fact that he still loves his wife and still wants to take care of her doesn’t make him any less of a loser.  He’s a thief, a guy who accidentally stole a sex tape and then decided to put it online.  The fact that he later feels guilty doesn’t change the fact that he did it.  There’s as scene in the fourth episode where Rand is upset to see someone else selling bootleg copies of the tape.  On the one hand, it’s not a bad scene.  There’s an enjoyable irony to Rand discovering that someone has essentially stolen the tape from him after Rand went through so much trouble to steal the tape from Tommy.  But the show doesn’t seem to be sure whether it wants us to laugh at Rand’s misfortune or to sympathize with him as he realizes that the consequences of his actions are out of his control.  As a character, Rand is not compelling enough for both to be an option.

As for the title characters, both Sebastian Stan and Lily James do their best but I get the feeling that we’ve already learned all the we need to know about them.  There was one good moment that examined Pam and Tommy’s different reactions to the release of the sex tape but otherwise, neither Tommy nor Pam are really that interesting as characters.  I ended the fourth hour of Pam & Tommy very much aware that there were still four more hours to go.  What else, I found myself wondering, could be left to be said?

Film Review: Munich — The Edge of War (dir by Christian Schwochow)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Munich — The Edge of War opens in 1932, at Oxford University, where three graduating students are toasting their futures as a part of the “mad generation” that’s come to age in the aftermath of World War I.  Six years later, two of them will reunite as the world appears to be on the verge of another great war.

One of them, Hugh Legat (George McKay), is a secretary to the English Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain (Jeremy Irons).  Chamberlain, haunted by the death and destruction of the Great War, is convinced that Europe can have “peace in our time,” through a policy of negotiation and appeasement.  He is aware of the men who have come to power in Italy and Germany and he’s certainly heard the rumors that they are planning on conquering Europe themselves.  However, Chamberlain is almost in denial about the reality of the situation, at one point suggesting that Hugh write a polite letter to Mussolini requesting that Mussolini tell Hitler to tone down his rhetoric.

Hugh’s classmate, Paul von Hartmann (Jannis Niewöhner), returned to Germany after graduating from Oxford.  At first, he was an enthusiastic backer of Hitler and the Nazi party.  He was rewarded with a position as a translator in the Foreign Office.  However, Paul has since become disillusioned with Hitler and is painfully aware of the anti-Semitism that has become a part of everyday life in Berlin.  Paul regularly meets with a group of generals who are plotting a coup against Hitler.  The generals believe that, if they allow Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia, the German people will rise up in order to avoid being led into another war and that they will cheer as the generals march into Hitler’s office and place him under arrest.  Paul worries that the generals are being naïve.  Adding to Paul’s problems is a former childhood friend named Franz Sauer (August Diehl).  Sauer is a new member of the SS and he has a disconcerting habit of showing up anywhere that Paul happens to be, almost as if he is aware that Paul is not the dedicated civil servant that he pretends to be.  When Paul receives a stolen document that reveals the details of Hitler’s true plans for Europe, he and Hugh team up to try to keep Chamberlain from singing the Munich Agreement.

Looking over the events that led to World War II, one question that historians frequently ask is why did Neville Chamberlain consistently refuse to stand up to Hitler despite Hitler’s growing acts of aggression.  Why did Chamberlain knowingly turn a blind eye to every treaty and agreement that Hitler broke or ignored?  Why, with Hitler openly declaring his plans to conquer Europe, did Chamberlain and so many others insist that Hitler’s actions would somehow be different from his words?  Was Chamberlain just naïve or was he, like so many others who had been traumatized by the Great War, in willful denial about the inevitability of conflict with Hitler?  Was Chamberlain just a politician trying to keep a war-weary public happy or did he truly believe that signing an agreement with Hitler would somehow lead to “peace in our time?”  Munich — The Edge of War suggests that all of the above may be true, with Jeremy Irons playing Chamberlain as being an old school establishmentarian, one with sincere intentions but also one who is incapable of truly understanding the new reality that has been brought about by the desolation of World War I.  As played by Irons, Chamberlain is occasionally sympathetic but, even more frequently, he’s obstinate in his short-sightedness and his insistence that he alone understands how to deal with Hitler.  He’s not necessarily a bad man but he’s definitely not the right man for the times.

Of course, the majority of the film focuses not on Chamberlain but instead on Paul and Hugh.  George McKay and Jannis Niewöhner both give good performances as two civil servants who know the truth but find it impossible to get anyone to listen to them.  Niewöhner is especially effective as Paul, capturing not only his disillusionment with Germany but also his disgust for himself for having been previously fooled by Hitler’s rhetoric.  Like Chamberlain, Paul was also in denial about Hitler’s true beliefs.  The difference is that Paul has learned from his mistake and is now desperately trying to reveal the truth, even if no one else wants to hear it.

It’s a good and effective film, one that works both as a historical drama and an espionage thriller.  The film is at its best when it focuses on what daily life is like when a nation is living in the shadow of the possibility of war.  Hugh comes home to discover his son wearing a gas mask and he has to convince his wife to leave London for the weekend, even though he can’t specifically tell her why.  Meanwhile, Paul lives in a Berlin that’s full of imposing architecture and seemingly happy people but with a shadow of menace hanging over every street corner.  The city’s new buildings, built to celebrate Hitler’s vision of a new Germany, are all disturbingly pristine, as if they only exist so that evil can hide behind their impressive facades.  And in the background of every scene in Berlin, there are the uniformed men with their red armbands and their haughty glares.

It’s said that hindsight is 20/20 and, indeed, it’s easy to look at someone like Neville Chamberlain and dismiss him as just being a tragically failed and foolish politician.  And there is definitely an argument to be made that he was.  (That’s certainly how I tend to view him.)  Still, Munich — The Edge of War does a good job of capturing not only the feeling of a world on the verge of war but also the motivations of those who closed their eyes to what was coming and also to those who did not.  That we know that Paul and Hugh’s efforts are ultimately to be for naught adds a poignant sadness to the scenes of them trying to get someone to listen to them but it also makes for a powerful viewing experience.  How many eyes were open in the 30s?  How many eyes are closed today?

Film Review: Home Team (dir by Charles Kinnane and Daniel Kinnane)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The new Happy Madison production, Home Team, opens with Sean Payton (Kevin James) discovering that life can be difficult when you’re the coach of an NFL team.

On the one hand, Payton coached the New Orleans Saints to a Super Bowl victory and gave hope to a city that was still struggling to recover from the mental, physical, and spiritual damage done by Hurricane Katrina.  At a time when David Fincher was bringing everyone’s spirits down with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Sean Payton was raising them up with excellent football.

On the other hand, it was later discovered that the players were being paid extra to deliberately injure their opponents.

The NFL reacts to this scandal by suspending Payton for a year.  Payton abruptly goes from having a luxurious office in New Orleans to living and working out of a hotel suite in Argyle, Texas.  He spends his suspension trying to reconnect with his son, Connor (Tait Blum).  And when he discovers that Connor is playing football for his sixth grade team, Sean can’t stop himself from stepping up and trying to help Troy (Taylor Lautner) and Mitch (Gary Valentine) coach the team.  Soon, Payton actually is coaching the team himself!  And though he’s winning games, he’s also pushing the players too hard.  Can Sean Payton rediscover the simple love of doing your best and being a member of a team or is he destined to return to New Orleans and continue to hand out bonuses for injuring other players?  What do you think?

Now, I’ll just be honest and admit that I’m not a football fan.  I don’t really know much about Sean Payton or the whole targeting scandal.  I do know about CTE and the dangers of suffering multiple concussions in a short period of time so I do feel safe in assuming that the implications of the targeting scandal were a bit more serious than the way they’re portrayed in the film.  But, then again, this is a football film that was produced by Adam Sandler’s production company.  Was anyone expecting it to be a serious examination of the dangers of playing pro or even amateur football?  Instead, it’s a film that pretty much features every cliché in the book, from the team of underdogs that no one believed in to the down-and-out coach who has something to prove to both the doubters and to himself.  There’s the usual mix of sentimental drama and equally sentimental comedy.  Surprisingly for a Happy Madison production, there’s only one glaring case of gross-out humor.  For whatever reason, there’s apparently a lot of people who find projectile vomiting to be entertaining.  I’ve never cared much for it myself but, just as I have to be honest about not knowing much about Sean Payton, I should probably also be honest about the fact that I’m not this film’s target audience.

Kevin James is a likable actor, though his talents are definitely better served by television than by the movies.  He gives a rather subdued performance here, one that was no doubt influenced by the fact that Sean Payton is still alive.  Even when he rediscovers the joy of playing football and realizes that there are things more important than winning, James-as-Payton still comes across as being strictly business.  You get the feeling that, with the exception of his son, the film’s Sean Payton will probably have no further contact with the kids he coached once he returns to New Orleans.  In the film, it just comes across as something for him to do to pass the time.

Home Team is a fairly forgettable sports movie.  It’s not particularly good but it’s not particularly terrible either.  Instead, it’s typical of the adequate but not extremely memorable films that Netflix specializes in when no one is looking to win an Oscar.

Film Review: Men With Brooms (dir by Paul Gross)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Yesterday, having watched a bit of the Winter Games, I decided that I wanted to watch a movie about curling.

Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that there aren’t really a lot of curling films out there.  There’s several films about ice skaters, of course.  They all feature haughty skaters being forced to partner up with blue collar amateurs and almost all of them end with everyone falling in love.  (Yay!)  And there’s plenty of hockey movies.  They all feature brawny Canadians getting into fights and almost all of them end with someone losing their front two teeth.  (Yay!)  But there aren’t a whole lot of curling movies.  I guess some people don’t believe that a broom on ice can be cinematic.  Well, the joke’s on them!  Brooms are very cinematic!  However, I did finally come across the 2002 Canadian film, Men With Brooms, on Tubi.

Now, you should understand that when I say that Men With Brooms is a Canadian film, I mean that it is very, very Canadian.  This isn’t just a film that was shot in Canada by an American company looking for tax credits and a city that looked like New York without being as expensive.  Instead, this is a film about very polite people who say “eh?” frequently and who are usually wearing several layers of clothing in order to protect from the chill in the air and the snow on the ground.  This not a film that was shot in Canada for an American audience.  This is a film that was made by Canadians for Canadians and that’s actually kind of nice.  There’s even a scene where the characters bemoan the arrival of another “American” fast food restaurant.  Speaking as an American, I think we are far too often guilty of taking our neighbors to the north for granted.  It’s good to be reminded that they are a separate nation with a separate culture and their own individual way of looking at the world.

The film begins with the death of an old man named Donald Foley (James B. Douglas).  Ten years before he died, Donald was the head coach of the greatest curling rink to ever play in Ontario.  (For those — like me! — who are not familiar with all of the details and lingo of curling, a rink is just another word for team.)  However, the rink broke up under mysterious circumstances.  The former rink skip (team captain), Chris Cutter (Paul Gross), left Foley’s daughter at the altar and skipped town.  He also tossed the rink’s curling stones into a lake!  In fact, it was while he was retrieving the stones that Donald had the heart attack that killed him.  Way to go, Chris, ya hoser!

The entire team reunites for Foley’s cremation and they discover that the coach has had his ashes put into a curling stone.  And he wants the team to come back together and to win a championship using that very stone!  And he also wants Chris to reconnect with his father, Gordon (Leslie Nielsen).  Of course, it turns out that Chris is not the only member of the team to have issues.  One team member has a low sperm count.  Another one is a drug dealer and another is having a mid-life crisis.  But they’ll all set aside their differences and try to win one for the coach!  And if they even think about quitting, there will always be a helpful townsperson around to say, “You’re going to win the Golden Broom, eh?”

Tonally, Men With Brooms is all over the place.  Odd comedic moments are mixed in with scenes of sentimental drama and the end result is a film that never seem to be quite sure what it’s trying to be.  Not all of the big emotional moments pay off.  Leslie Nielsen, though, is pretty good playing a relatively straight role.  (He still gets his share of funny lines but this performance is definitely a different comedic beast from the deadpan style of self-parody that he’s best known for.)  Ultimately, flaws aside, it’s a likable and fairly well-acted film, one that has a gentle spirit in even its raunchier moments.  It’s just so damn Canadian that it’s hard not to appreciate it.

Add to that, it’s a good film to watch if you’re trying to teach yourself about curling.  It may have been a slight film but, thanks to Men With Brooms, I now officially know that a curling team is called a rink.  You learn something new every day.