Echoes of 1980s indie film noir run deep throughout “Door Mouse,” a new, gritty mystery thriller starring Vancouver’s Hayley Law as a burlesque performer on a quest for justice.
Law is Mouse, a chain-smoking, part time comic book creator and full-time dancer at a seedy burlesque club run by the tough-as-nails Mama (Famke Janssen).
When some of her friends and fellow dancers go missing, one snatched from her home, another abducted, pushed into a limo never to be seen again, the police are apathetic, unable or unwilling to investigate the disappearance of “girls no one will miss.”
Looking for answers. Mouse recruits her friend Ugly (Keith Powers) to delve into the dark, sordid world of drug dealers, kidnapping and sex trafficking, where vulnerable women are sold to “rich and powerful monsters.”
“These are dangerous questions you’re asking Mouse,” warns a sleazy club owner. “If you don’t want to crash, stay in your lane.”
“Door Mouse” has style to burn. Actor-turned-director Avan Jogia wrings every dime out of his low budget, utilizing eye-catching camera angles, animation and an abrasive “wake ‘em up” soundtrack and music cues to create a film with comic book noir aesthetics, that owes a debt to 80s noirs like “Blood Simple” and cult hits like “Repo Man.”
The high style suits the story’s underworld backdrop, creating an uneasy atmosphere for Jogia’s morality play.
Populated by uneasy and often corrupt characters, “Door Mouse” boils down to a simple story of good vs. evil, of predators vs. prey. Jogia, who also wrote the script, belabors the point with dialogue that is often as melodramatic as the film is stylish. Lines like “You can only crawl on the ground so long before the dirt starts sticking to you,” sound ripped from an over-written soap opera script. Imagine the relish that Susan Lucci could have applied to those words. In this context, however, those dialogue flourishes feel unnecessarily theatrical.
“Door Mouse’s” stylized look at power dynamics, filtered through a genre lens, is compelling to a point, but bludgeons its central point, that its better to die with the sheep than eat sheep with the wolves, to the point of redundancy.
Gamers will recognize Raccoon City as the name of the once prosperous home base of pharmaceutical giant Umbrella Corp. That we’re talking about it on this page can only mean one thing, a new “Resident Evil” movie. The seventh film in the series, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City,” now playing in theatres, reboots the videogame-inspired franchise, taking the story back to the beginning.
Raccoon City once thrived. A company town, from the 1960s to the late 90s the Midwestern city grew and prospered as pharmaceutical giant Umbrella set up shop there, and invested heavily in infrastructure and the townsfolk, who made up the bulk of their employees.
Everything changed in 1998 when a genetically-altered organism named Queen Leech attacked the facility, kicking off a series of events that left the city a desolate wasteland with a zombie problem.
It’s into this world director Johannes Roberts drops college student Claire Redfield (Kaya Scodelario) and rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia) on one terrifying night in Raccoon City. Claire has come to the dying city to locate her brother Chris (Robbie Amell). The T-virus, Umbrella’s top-secret biological weapon isn’t much of a secret anymore, and the infected residents of Raccoon City are now terrifying zombies. Over the course of one night Claire, Chris, and others from the video game series like Leon (Avan Jogia), Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen) and Albert Wesker (Umbrella Academy’s Tom Hopper), fight to survive.
Adapted from the first and second “Resident Evil” games by Capcom, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” returns the series to its video game roots. The previous films emphasized action over horror. This time around Roberts reverts to scary vibe of the videogames, paying homage to both the games and vintage John Carpenter for the atmosphere of dread that builds throughout. Stylistically, as a videogame tribute, that approach works quite well.
As a movie, however, it comes up lacking. Despite some good gooey and gory zombie action and some fun action scenes, it takes too long to get where it is going. While we wait for the going to get good, we’re subjected to dialogue straight out of the Handbook of Horror Clichés and too much exposition.
The opening feels long winded and the ending rushed, but, especially for gamers looking for Easter Eggs, “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” has enough moments in between to satisfy fans of the series.
Sometimes you don’t get what you want, but you get what you need. Especially in coming-of-age movies.
In “The Exchange,” now on VOD, teenager Tim Long (Ed Oxenbould) was born and has lived his entire life in a small Ontario town, but feels like an outsider. Obsessed with all things French, he’s a student of Camus, worships Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, and looks down on his school mates and even family. The feeling is mutual. “Bookworm” and “loser” are two of the nicer jabs thrown his way. “Everyone hates you,” says Gary (Justin Hartley) the school’s soccer coach. The only person Tim really likes is Brenda (Jayli Wolf), who is unaware of his crush.
Craving sophisticated company, he signs up for an exchange program to acquire a “mail order best friend.” He’s hoping the exchange student will be a Gallic breath of fresh air in his stale little town. But instead of an erudite tour guide to all thing French he gets Stéphane (Avan Jogia), a teenage chain-smoking horndog more interested in girls than Gruyère Gougères.
After making a splash in town Stéphane’s behavior soon starts to raise eyebrows until he finds an unlikely supporter.
“The Exchange” is based on a true story. Screenwriter Tim Long, a Canadian from Manitoba who has been the consulting producer of “The Simpsons” for twenty plus years, adapts his own awkward friendship with an exchange student as the basis for the story. I’m sure characters are amplified and situations blown out of proportion, but underneath it all “The Exchange” is a feel-good story with laughs and a great deal of heart.
It’s lighthearted but that doesn’t prevent “The Exchange” from adding denser textures to the story. Near the end Long and director Dan Mazer (longtime writing partner of Sacha Baron Cohen) tackle the xenophobia that informs the latter part of the movie. After a brief moment of celebrity in town, the tide turns against Stéphane due to veiled racism. He is, as the Gallophile Tim might have said, l’étranger, an outsider whose motives are questioned, simply because he wasn’t born in the local hospital. It gets sorted—“We drew certain conclusions about you being different,” a character says to him—and is handled delicately, but in our divided times it hits the nail on the head.
Ultimately “The Exchange” works because it is about empathy. It’s funny, with the kind of premise that could have been sitcom fodder, but beyond the laughs is a bigger message of acceptance.
“Paper Year” is a coming-of-age story about two people who should have already come-of-age.
Out-of-work actor Dan Delaney (Avan Jogia) and aspiring writer Franny Winters (Eve Hewson) are impulsive twenty-somethings who married quickly, without any kind of life plan. Unemployed and carefree for much of their first year of wedded bliss, the dynamic of their relationship changes when he comes home one day with an announcement. “I forgot to tell you,” he says, “but I got a job. A real adult person, adult job” looking after the mansion and dogs of a b-movie star. As he stays home looking after the dogs, she takes a job as a junior writer on the game show “Goosed.” “We’re going to be rich,” he says. “Can I get a Nintendo?” Her career is on an upward swing while he stays in lounging by the pool, watching porn and playing videogames. Will they make it to their first anniversary as their careers go in two different directions? “What do you mean work?” he says. “It’s just you writing for your dumb job.”
“Paper Year” is a low-key examination of relationships, brought to life by strong performances by Hewson who, if she continues doing work this strong will soon lose the label of “Bono’s daughter, and Delaney. The pair has an easy way about them as they navigate the landmines of an unplanned life. Writer-director Rebecca Addelman provides realistic dialogue and relatively low-stakes situations that allow her actors to shine. Harassment at work, respect at home and straying feelings are all delicately addressed. It’s never terribly dramatic but neither is it stagey. Addelman and company are more interested in keeping it natural, allowing the characters drive the situations, not the other way round.
