SYNOPSIS: In “Level,” a new indie sci-fi thriller starring Peter Mooney and Cara Gee, and now playing in theatres, bookseller Joe (Peter Mooney) falls for Ash (Cara Gee), a woman with a mysterious past… and present.
“I need to tell you something,” she says. “I’m not from here.” “I know,” he replies, “you’re from Bridgewater.” “No,” she clarifies, “I’m not from here.” Emphasis on the word here.
Before she can explain, she is killed, leaving Joe shattered, with just one clue, a book she left behind called “On Being Human.” With his life in pieces, he questions what is real and what is not in his pursuit of Ash’s killer. “I don’t know if I’m real,” he says. “Doesn’t seem like it.”
CAST: Cara Gee, Peter Mooney, Aaron Abrams, Jade Ma, Adam Hurtig and David Hewlett. Directed by Adam Stern.
REVIEW: Big ideas abound in “Level.” Writer/director Adam Stern questions the very fabric of reality, asking if answers to the world’s problems can be found in simulations. “The world is shit,” evil genius Anthony Hunter (Aaron Abrams) says, outlining his plan to use simulations to find out what happens before it happens; before climate change happens, before a fascist can get elected, and before millions of people die because of outdated ideologies and misinformation. With his plan, however, comes an even bigger question, Are his dangerous methods worth the results?
Stern’s sci fi movie is of the mind. There are some cool images and special effects—Stern’s resume features 75 visual effects credits—but “Levels” is Christopher Nolan Lite, with big philosophical notions but without the eye-popping images to accompany them.
It wants to engage the brain more than it wants to dazzle the eye, and it may spark up the synapses, but first you’ll have to wade through a lot of exposition. This is a tell-me, don’t-show-movie, and, as such, frequently gets a bit too wordy for its own good.
Debating the very idea of reality should up the stakes, but the volume of exposition slows down the film’s forward momentum. As a result, Stern’s messages of hope for the future of humankind are heartfelt but come packaged in a movie that lacks urgency.
“All About Who You Know” takes a rom com premise and uses it to tell a story of ambition, cynicism and romance. But it’s not a rom com. It’s too meta for that. It’s a movie that follows the rom com rules but twists them to become a tribute to the kind of movies that inspired it.
Cole (Dylan Everett) is a film grad who sees life through a lens of movie references. His life is a series of imagined scenarios, ripped from the movies he is obsessed with. His dreams are that of many a film student. He wants to live and work in Los Angeles, writing screenplays that don’t follow the “same six storylines,” but he needs an in. When he meets Haley (Niamh Wilson), daughter of an Oscar winning screenwriter (David Hewlett) he contrives a rom com style hook up to get to her and her father. “It was all planned like some horses**t heist movie,” he says later. His scheme works but he soon realizes that real life and the movies are two very different things.
“All About Who You Know” takes a genre we’ve all seen and recontextualizes it with clever dialogue and characters who don’t behave as though they have just swigged from a bottle of love potion. They bare themselves in ways that no real rom com would allow. When he questions why she didn’t give him her phone number when they first met she says, “Because I wanted you to find me. I wanted you to prove that you wanted me. I am sick and tired of being obsessed with people who aren’t obsessed with me back.”
It is, as the tagline on the poster reads, “romantic-ish,” a movie that finds satisfaction in allowing the characters to behave true to form and not by allowing the form to dictate how the characters will behave. It’s a nervy take on the rom com genre and it works.
“All About Who You Know” is a clever movie that sometimes feels a little too self-aware and occasionally allows the pacing to go slack but a trio of lead performances from Everett, Wilson and Stephen Joffe as Cole’s BFF bring the film’s premise to shimmering life.
Add to that a sparkling indie soundtrack and you have something that isn’t a rom com—maybe we should call it a rom can’t—but a reinvention from Canadian writer-director Jake Horowitz.
“All About Who You Know,” which lost its festival run to the pandemic, can be now be found on Crave.
I suppose enough time has elapsed so that a film like “Lucky Day” can no longer be seen simply as a Quentin Tarantino rip off but can now be regarded as an homage to the crime movies of the 1990s, especially when it is directed by Roger Avary, the co-writer of “Pulp Fiction.”
The film takes place during one eventful and bloody day. It begins with Red (Luke Bracey), a safecracker with an artist wife Chloe (Nina Dobrev) and adorable daughter Beatrice (Ella Ryan Quinn), finishing up a two-year jail sentence for a heist gone wrong. As low lifes go he’s a decent sort. He’s a just a guy who robbed a bank and skimmed half a million bucks to look after his family.
Luc (Crispin Glover) doesn’t quite see it that way. He’s a hitman for a crime cartel called The Connection. “I’m in the retirement business,” he tells border security in his outrageous and completely fake French accent. He’s come to California to “retire” Red. Seems Luc’s brother was part of Red’s team but was killed in action and now the faux Frenchman has come to exact his revenge.
“Pulp Fiction,” for better and for worse, inspired a slew of imitators complete with over-the-top violence, groovy yet quirky soundtracks, old-school details and unusual characters. And don’t forget the irreverent, edgy and politically incorrect dialogue.
“Lucky Day” falls firmly into the Pretend “Pulp Fiction” category.
It’s a movie with all the bits and pieces of the Tarantino classic but with a tenth of the impact. To be fair, Avary pulls charming performances from the cast, crafting the kind of eccentric, cartoonish characters that fuel these kind of films but nothing really connects. From start to finish you know who will survive and who won’t so the stakes never seem very high even when Luc has nice people in the crosshairs of his gun.
In “Lucky Day” Avary has made a buoyant, if predictable thriller, efficiently told, with some laughs and a gallon or ten of blood to paint the screen. It’s not “Pulp Fiction” but then again, what is?
