Colette Arrand

Tag: Jay Baruchel

  • Movie Review: Goon (2012)

    Movie Review: Goon (2012)

    essentialGiven the National Hockey League’s flirtation with work stoppage-induced disaster, Goon plays like an unrequited love letter to a sport whose heart is three sizes too small. The hockey immortalized here—the slow, bone-crunching, blood curdling style of play where one or two men on every squad was hired more for their fists than their abilities with a stick—has been on the endangered list for some time now, first as a consequence of the League’s desire for a faster game, then as concerns over concussion-related brain damage rose, but that doesn’t matter. The hockey of Goon is that of pop-culture past, three twenty-minute periods of blood, mullets, and dirty-minded foreign players. Those wondering how hockey could engender such a devoted, wounded fan base would find their answer here.

    Goon’s hero is a nice, well-adjusted dude named Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott). He’s a bouncer with fists of steel and an indestructible head, skills that serve him well when his buddy Pat (Jay Baruchel, who also co-wrote with Superbad‘s Evan Goldberg) lets his mouth run away with him at a game. When a player has enough of Pat, he charges into the stands. He is promptly put down by Doug, who is quickly invited to play for the local squad. He turns into a local sensation and is hired onto a farm-league team in Halifax, where he’ll serve as an enforcer to Xavier LaFlemme (Marc-Andre Grondin), a shaken star trying to return to form after suffering a monstrous, highly illegal hit from Ross “The Boss” Rhea (Leiv Schreiber), a goon whose particularly dirty style of play sees him in the minor leagues and on his last legs.

    Like Slap Shot, Goon follows its fictional team through the wilderness that is minor league hockey. Their hometown of Halifax is a veritable paradise compared to the prospect of “riding piss-hole” on the bus to another town, the punishment for turning in a particularly awful performance. Doug’s teammates are the usual assemblage of sports comedy also-rans: LaFlemme is a womanizing drug addict, the captain is an alcoholic, the coach issues meaninglessly aggressive proclamations, and the announcer is a half-hearted amalgam of Bob Uecker in Major League and John Candy in Rookie of the Year, but the Slap Shot formula—as proven successfully here and by Major League—still works, putting those stereotypes to work as parts to a lovingly constructed machine as opposed to identifiable components left out on the workbench.

    It helps that Doug Glatt is an incredibly likable focal point. A well-meaning, dim-witted black sheep in a family of doctors, Doug’s a guy trying to make the best of the gifts he has. He’s incredibly polite to the men he bludgeons, but his parents look at his barbaric conquests on the rink—and the signs in the crowd reading “Glatt is Hebrew for ‘Fuck you!’”—with obvious disdain. He’s supported by Pat and his brother, but those guys would support him through anything. In a strange city, teaming with a bunch of weird men who look at him like he’s a circus freak, its understandable that Doug looks for some outside validation. He finds it in Eva (Alison Pill), a self-described bad girlfriend who loves beer and finds the violence of the hockey rink a huge turn-on.

    The only character beyond Doug who receives more than an embellishment of detail is Ross Rhea, his rival in the pugilistic arts. That’s thanks largely to reputation. With his mullet, his goatee, and his seen-it-all attitude, Leiv Schreiber is an amalgam of the game’s deadliest goons, a caveman philosopher who sees the destruction of Doug Glatt as a last chance to define his legacy before the game phases him out completely. The miracle of Goon is that it’s able to build anticipation for the eventual slugfest beyond the occasional reminder that, yes, this is important stuff. Even better, the fight lives up to the hype, a gladiatorial death match that’s more gruesome than the pile of dead teenagers at the end of a slasher film.

    If you’re able to look past Goon‘s flaws as a sports movie—the relationship between Scott and the talented but underutilized Alison Pill, being a romance between a nice athlete and a girl with low self-esteem, begins saccharine sweet and ends up somewhat grating—what’s left is an incredibly pleasant experience, made better when the credits roll without the film taking an uncalled for detour into pious sermonizing. Sports movies have become a mostly toxic genre thanks to the odd notion that without several manufactured moments of life-affirming uplift, the events depicted will register as mostly pointless. Goon is proof that if filmmakers love a subject enough, something worthwhile will emerge.

    Goon. With Seann William Scott (Doug Glatt), Leiv Schreiber (Ross Rhea), Alison Pill (Eva), Jay Baruchel (Pat), Marc-Andre Grondin (Xavier LaFlemme), and Eugene Levy (Dr. Glatt). Directed by Michael Dowse from a screenplay by Baruchel and Evan Goldberg.

  • Movie Review: Cosmopolis (2012)

    Movie Review: Cosmopolis (2012)

    essentialIn reviewing the Don DeLillo novel that became this film, John Updike lamented that, despite the “haloes of import” weaving themselves around the events of the book, “the trouble with a tale where anything can happen is that somehow nothing happens.” There’ve been many odysseys since Homer recounted the one undertaken by Ulysses, but the modern odyssey has been cursed with the observation that nothing happens—despite all possibilities and evidences to the contrary—since Leopold Bloom took his in the novel bearing the homeric hero’s name. Boiled down, Ulysses is an argument that a single day in the life of an ordinary man has the same epic potential as a woe-begotten voyage across the sea.  Cosmopolis, the DeLillo novel adapted by David Cronenberg, makes the same argument, except its protagonist is so obviously set apart from the notion of normality that, rather than watching him shit in an outhouse, we’re left wondering if he shits to begin with.

    Don’t take this as evidence that nothing important happens here. Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson) is as unsympathetic as protagonists get—an unaccountably rich young man who travels across the city in his bulletproof, cork-lined, technological terror of a limousine for a haircut despite Presidential visits, populist uprisings, and threats directed specifically towards him—but there’s something profound in the mundane way he comes to realize that his life is in crisis, something powerful about the way he responds.

    It’s clear from the start that Packer could live in his limousine if he needed or wanted to. It’s outfitted with supercomputers and high-definition video screens, comes with a dedicated driver and crack security force. He tells a person in the car with him that he had the limo lined with cork to keep out street-level noise. There’s a hint of annoyance when he reports that it doesn’t work. He asks the driver where the cars go at night. He’s moved by the death of a rapper whose music constantly plays on the second of his private elevators. Packer’s elevated himself to godhood and isolated himself in his car, his office, and his apartment, but this is the day the world checks in to remind him that he is just a man.

    This is fine by Packer, whose unstated goal for the evening is complete self-destruction. A parade of people who work for him (Jay Baruchel, Juilliette Binoche, Samantha Morton, and Emily Hampshire, among others) sit across from him in the limousine and deliver various bits of bad news. He gambled against the rising value of the Yen and lost. He cannot buy and transport a cathedral from Europe for the purpose of sealing it away from the rest of the world. His wife (Sarah Gadon) seems to only tenuously remember their marriage. Both question its function, have yet to consumate. His chief of security (Kevin Durand) knocks on the window to tell him that it’s better to turn back. There’s the President’s visit. The rapper’s funeral. A riot. His limo is battered, damaged, vandalized. He is stalked through the city despite his vehicle’s relatively mundane appearance among the rest of the white limousines. Though his life is actively worsening with every inch of separation between his limo and its point of origin, Hacker remains undaunted. He will have that haircut.

    The haircut, of course, is nothing. It’s desire. Desire, Cronenberg suggests, more often than not ends in disappointment. Of the two arguments Cosmopolis makes, this is the more successful. This is obviously a film for and of its time, but any statement Cronenberg tries to make about the nature of money and misery can’t help but ring hollow. Eric Packer is a man too far removed from humanity to let something like the loss of wealth and autonomy spoil this detachment, and when a figure emerges from the shadows to embarrass him, his response is a fit of brutal violence. The most effective scenes here involve Packer’s interrogations of those whom he has real, unadulterated contact with. How does one detach themselves from the notion that someone is only sleeping with you because the thought of you as an assassination victim is a small excitement in an otherwise routine day? The idea of a haircut is nice, but does the excitement remain once the barber has dusted your shoulders? If he should slip and cut off too much?

    Cosmopolis is a surprisingly unsettling film for much of its runtime, content to limit the actions to the busy, businesslike world of Packer’s limousine and the anarchy going on outside. The limo is not unlike the gate of a fortress, and those outside it, having laid siege on the vehicle’s occupant for most of the day, are tantalizingly close to bashing those gates in. One Packer roams free from his car, Cronnenberg is unable to maintain the vibe and momentum he’d so subtly built. The conflict, from that point on, is no longer between two colliding worlds, but two ships sending each other conflicting signals. In the barber chair or seated across from his “credible threat” (Paul Giamatti), Packer’s interactions with the people unfortunate enough to be in the same room as him feel like two people reading aloud pages from vastly different books. On one hand, that’s human interaction. On the other,  Cosmopolis‘ refusal to submit to the needs of a standard narrative leads to a frustrating conclusion, with nothing resolved. The lives of two men intersect. All we know is that both have urges. For what? Not even they seem so sure.

    Cosmopolis. With Robert Pattinson (Eric Packer), Kevin Durand (Torval), Jay Baruchel (Shiner), Juliette Binoche (Didi Francher), Samantha Morton (Vija Kinsky), Sara Gadon (Elise), Emily Hampshire (Jane Melman), and Paul Giamatti (Benno Levin). Directed by David Cronenberg from a screenplay by Cronenberg, based on the novel Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo.