2003-02-04

OK, I�m going to start with my least favourite film of the festival: Yellowknife.

The movie starts with a young French-Canadian guy, Max, busting a young French-Canadian woman, Linda, out of a psych ward in Moncton, New Brunswick. She doesn�t seem too keen to leave, and he pretty much has to strong-arm her out of the hospital. The two get in a pickup truck and drive away. Max tells Linda that he has always wanted to take her to Yellowknife. Wow, only five minutes into the movie, and we already know where the title comes from.

Max and Linda stop to pick up a couple of Anglo hitchhikers, to Linda�s strenuous objections. It�s never clear why Max is so hell-bent on picking them up, but pick them up he does. They seem like nice, clean cut boys, and Max ends up allowing them to crash in their motel room. As you can imagine, Linda likes the idea of sharing a room with them even less than she likes sharing the inside of the truck cab with them (at one point she makes them ride in the truck bed). She swears, screams, picks a fight with a waitress, and generally behaves in a really embarrassing way. It begins to become clear that although Max and Linda are both a little strange, she is the only one who is truly unhinged.

Anyway, it turns out that Bill and Billy (these are their names, according to the film guide description, but I swear I didn�t hear them mentioned once in the whole film) are twins who strip for a living. They have a twin-brother stripper act that is weirdly incestuous, although they don�t really do anything to each other. It�s just odd. While Max and Linda are at the cabaret where the two Bs are stripping, an aging disco diva, Marlene, comes onstage and begins belting out �Sugar Daddy.� It turns out she is played by Patsy Gallant, who was a real live Canadian disco sensation in the 1970s. I did not know this until the film fest coordinator told me. He was kind of stoked about seeing her in the movie, and I have to admit she was pretty cool, in an aging disco diva kind of way. She could sure sing, anyway.*

Linda is fascinated with Patsy�I mean, Marlene�and decides to become friends with her. Unfortunately for Linda, Marlene comes complete with a creepy pansexual manager, Johnny. Johnny doesn�t care who the sex is coming from, as long as it�s coercive and slightly degrading for the other person. Your guess as to whether Linda gets to keep her pants on for long.

Well, that�s pretty much the whole movie, except that it�s about two hours long. Oh, there�s more that happens, but not much more. Some shocking revelations (which I won�t reveal here, in case, despite reading this review, you still feel compelled to see this movie), lots more nudity and sex, blah blah blah. Unfortunately, none of this is accompanied by anything resembling character development, and there is no sense of plot, either. Things just seem to happen randomly, for no reason. There was not a single character in the movie that I cared about. That�s not to say I hated any of them; it�s more that I felt complete indifference to all of them, and couldn�t have cared less if they�d all fallen down dead halfway through the movie. At least then I could have gotten up and left. The only character whom I thought was even slightly developed was Johnny, and that�s mainly because the actor who played him was so darn good at playing a masochistic sexual predator. Yup, he pretty much had that nailed down.

There was a lot of sex in this movie, which I guess was supposed to be titillating or provocative or daring or something, but to be honest, it was repetitive and boring. It really served no purpose. There was only one sex scene that I thought really added to the film, and it occurs fairly early on, so for the rest of the movie we�re just watching people have sex for no discernable purpose. Which is OK, I guess, if you�re watching a porn movie, but I�d been under the impression that this film was supposed to have a plot.

The movie ends on more of a �Huh?� than an �Aha!�, but I guess that�s pretty much what I should have expected, given the rest of the film. It was like the filmmakers ran out of money and ideas, and said to each other, �Well, I guess that�s that. Just slap all that footage together, and let�s call it Yellowknife.�

I think I should hire myself out as a consultant to movie directors. The name of my consulting company would be It�s Too Damn Long And Pointless So Cut Thirty Minutes Off It, Inc.

Posted by polarcanuck at 10:02 p.m.

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