Remember when you were a kid and your mother told you that fairy tales weren’t real? That there wasn’t going to be a prince who gave you shoes and diamonds and whisked you off to a castle? Luckily Kate Middleton’s mother never told her that. Instead, she held Kate back a year so that she’d wind up in Prince William’s year at University, and the rest is history. Megan Markle took a more circuitous route, but she too wound up with a tiara in the end. The odds are against you, but it does happen. What our mothers should have been warning us about is the false promise of a Hallmark Christmas movie.
While a very few princes do exist, and do make princesses out of commoners, how many lawyers exist who meet a woman in a food court and then draw up a contract so they can fake date each other? None, and I should know: I’ve eaten a lot of soup in a lot of food courts.
And yet this is exactly what happens when Elise (Jaime King) grabs her favourite wonton soup and gets harassed by some mall Christmas carolers. Lawyer/Christmasphobe Nick (Luke Macfarlane) rushes to her aid, posing as her fake boyfriend to protect her from the unwanted holiday serenade. Nick had only moments before been lamenting his rotten luck in life – technically he’s up for partnership at his law firm, but the firm is both family-oriented and Christmas-obsessed, so his ambitions are bound to be thwarted. UNLESS. Unless he quickly draws up a contract obliging Elise to attend work functions with him, posing as his long-term, super serious girlfriend, and in exchange, he’ll pose as her significant other around her office too, where co-owns a travel agency with her sleazy ex-husband (Lochlyn Munro) who is constantly parading around the girlfriend he left her for.
I’m not sure what kind of national law firm of DIVORCE ATTORNEYS refuses to promote single people; lawyers are usually pretty aware how quickly such illegal discrimination would bring about some pretty hefty lawsuits. But they also impose strict Christmas rules (which, last I checked, is a christian holiday), including a mandatory party where the employees are forced to pay for new, symbolic ornaments (which you can find at your nearest Hallmark store, fyi) to trim their boss’s personal tree in their off hours at a party where women are not allowed to wear pants. I SWEAR TO GOD THIS IS ALL TRUE.
Does Elise wake up and realize she’s a little too old to inflate her self esteem with a fake boyfriend? Does Nick realize he could sue his company for millions and start his own Christmas-hating firm with the settlement? No. Instead, they feel bad for lying to “such nice people” and break the contract – not to mention each other’s hearts – and go back to being depressed around the holidays.
Does it make sense? No. Is it realistic? Of course not. But it’s comforting and familiar and I can guarantee you there’s a happy ending with your name on it.
IMDB describes this film as ‘An ensemble comedy about romance in the smartphone era’ which, if you read my review of Jexi, you’ll know made me want to find the nearest toilet and throw my phone right in, but since that thing knows my contacts AND my passwords, I just punched myself in the face instead. But I still watched the movie, through two swollen black eyes.
And I’m glad I did. Had you not read this description, you never would have paid much attention to the phones. They are, as in most people’s experience, simply an accessory to our daily lives. This is how we live now; they are as omnipresent as Ubers and pumpkin spice lattes and Donald Trump’s nonsensical tweets.
A group of grown-up friends in NYC is figuring shit out in life and love. It’s like Friends, if Rachel fell in love with a minor, Monica fucked a homeless dude, and Chandler made counterfeit paintings. Roughly speaking.
Haley (Zoe Chao) is trying to disentangle herself from a dependency situation of her own making; Cammy (Michelle Buteau) is realizing that the dating pool is so dire her deal breakers are surprisingly few; Marklin (Augustus Prew) is too busy carefully curating his Instagram posts to notice his actual life is a whole lot messier; Adam (Scott Evans) has so much suppressed rage it’s manifesting in physical blows; and Elizabeth (Kate Walsh) has for so long been the mascot for love in her circle of friends she’s having a hard time telling them she’s getting a divorce. When life isn’t perfect, do you lower your standards? Your expectations?
Mike Doyle writes and directs this low-key comedy, which works about as often as it doesn’t. Well, “doesn’t” is unfair. It’s more like: moments of thoughtful introspection, moments of surprisingly zany comedy, and moments that are achingly predictable. All elevated by a talented cast, the stand-out being Buteau, who I’ve seen stealing scenes in several Netflix movies now, and was glad to finally hold on to for more than just a few minutes at a time.
This movie kind of snuck up on me. I was enjoying it in a modest sort of way but then the end was somehow more than the sum of its parts. Love is hard. Life is hard. Everyone just wants to be seen, and when a film can reflect back your neuroses, your insecurities, your pettiest resentments without making you feel small or unfit, when it knows that finding true love, be they friends or be they lovers, means finding someone who sees the good and the bad and loves the whole package, then I think that movie has done its job.
Phil is a cliche who probably doesn’t exist in real life: he’s obsessed with his phone, he writes listicles for a living, he’s incapable of human interaction and would rather spend the night watching videos online than spending time with (or heck even making) friends.
Do Phils really exist? I suppose there’s a grain of truth in there somewhere: some people are overly attached to their phones, and overly desperate for likes on social media. But most people manage to have phones AND human friends. Our phones give us directions to where we want to go, they tell us who’s celebrating a birthday, and what bill needs to be paid. They help us call a car, and order lunch, and share a recipe. They remind us how to spell ‘accommodate’ and when our period is due, or overdue. They connect us to our adorable nephews who haven’t stopped growing just because they’re in quarantine. They keep us entertained on planes, they keep us up to date on elections, and they provide a near infinite supply of puppy pictures. All on one pocket sized device! So yeah, I’m not down on phones, or on young people for using them. I’m not sure who benefits for perpetuating the myth that only young people are obnoxious about their phones, but it’s patently untrue. Moms were the first to adopt cell phones, so they could stay in constant contact with their children. Moms are basically the only people who still use phones for calling people (ew!). Dads invented the belt holster so you could show off your love of wearable electronics (before they were technically wearable) while also accidentally broadcasting what a huge douche you are. When someone is blocking your view of the Mona Lisa by taking pictures with their iPad, 9 out of 10 times it’s a baby boomer. Elbowed in the eye by someone ineptly using a selfie stick? Boomer. Someone talking on their cell in the public bathroom stall next to yours? Most likely a boomer. Cell phone ringing during a Broadway performance? Definitely a boomer. And yet: Phil. Phil (Adam Devine) just can’t be separated from his phone. So yeah, he’s totally panicked when he literally runs into Cate (Alexandra Shipp) one day, destroying his phone in the process. Without a thought for the woman who may also be injured, he races his broken phone to the nearest ER cell phone store where employee Denice (Wanda Sykes) breaks the bad news: it’s not going to make it. You’d think that by the speed with which he rushed the thing to urgent care he’d be quite upset, but not only are cell phones replaceable, constant upgrades are a way to signal status. Behold the new phone!
This phone is unlike other phones. Its operating system is feisty. Call her Jexi. She sounds suspiciously like Rose Byrne, and she knows everything there is to know about Phil, since he’s documented it obsessively in the cloud. Not only does Jexi know everything, she has opinions about it. And she starts steering his life in the direction she believes is best.
Imagine if HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Sam (Scarlett Johansson) from Her had an AI baby and named her Jexi. Jexi is strangely alluring for someone who doesn’t have a body. She’s no Ava (Alicia Vikander) from Ex Machina. She’s more like your craziest, most jealous, most stalkery ex, only Jexi has access to your dating profiles, your porn collection, your work contacts, and your dick pics.
Even though the 2020 movie season is experiencing extreme drought, I scrolled right by this rental for many months. I’m not much of an Adam Devine fan and though desperate times call for desperate measures, I held out hope that I’d not hit my bottom quite yet. But don’t despair. This viewing wasn’t motivated by desperation so much as it now being able to stream on Amazon Prime (so, free for me, since I have an account). But even free was too high of a cost – what’s worse than an unfunny comedy? An unfunny comedy that makes you wish you’d just watched Her instead. Or Ex Machina. An unfunny comedy that makes you wish you’d watched any other AI movie, or even any other unfunny comedy that didn’t get your hopes up just as you resigned yourself to it. Because while it was Adam Devine’s smug pug face keeping me away this whole time, actually clicking on it revealed castmates like Sykes, Byrne, and Michael Pena, all of whom led me to believe this might not have been as bad as I’d feared and then it was WORSE. Arghghghghg.
This movie is for a very, very small demographic: baby boomers lacking in senses of both humour and irony who will suffer through unfunny comedies just to feel superior to young people as they scroll through Facebook, clicking on all the COVID clickbait conspiracies planted by Russia as if they aren’t the ones who used screens as babysitters in the first place. Ahem.
The Lion King live action remake got one thing right: it remembered that it is primarily an African story. To be fair, it was likely the Broadway show that did this for them, but Jon Favreau had the presence of mind to follow their lead and cast actual black actors in the important speaking parts. The Disney cartoon from 1994 wasn’t motivated by authenticity and we as a culture failed to keep them honest. So when Favreau chose only one returning voice actor to serve as a link between the two films, James Earl Jones was both the obvious and the best choice. His is the voice of wisdom that runs throughout both films, but the 2019 version backs that shit up with a stellar cast that is as talented as they are representative: Chiwetel Ejiofor, John Kani, Alfre Woodard, Keegan-Michael Key, JD McCrary, Chance the Rapper, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Florence Kasumba, Eric André. But none were chosen more carefully or more brilliantly than our Simba and Nala, Donald Glover and Beyoncé; they aren’t just black actors but recent symbols of owning one’s blackness. If the The Lion King remake justifies itself at all, it’s by putting those two front and centre, sending a powerful message of just who should be King and Queen.
Black Is King is a visual album from genius multi-hyphenate Beyoncé. It reimagines the lessons of The Lion King for today’s young kings and queens in search of their own crowns. It is a love letter to her African roots while celebrating Black families.
Beyoncé is the undisputed Queen of Pop. Her ascension must have come with a lot of racism, overt and covert, attached – she would have been accused of exploiting her culture while also being asked to suppress it – problems the likes of Pink and Madonna and Lady Gaga never considered let alone experienced. This system seems to have caused or at least contributed to the internalized hatred of his race in her counterpart, King of Pop, Michael Jackson. And yet Beyoncé has not just transcended the challenges to her skin tone and hair texture, she has come out on the other side a powerful and vocal advocate for anti-racism. For many of us, the change in her was undeniable at the 2016 Super Bowl, a performance dubbed “unapologetically black,” incorporating dancers in Black Panther berets performing black power salutes, arranging themselves into the letter “X” for Malcolm, a homemade sign demanding “Justice for Mario Woods”, and Beyoncé’s own costume, said to be a tribute to Michael Jackson. The performance reflected the modern civil rights movement Black Lives Matter and handed us her rallying cry in the song Formation, which references slogans such as “Stop shooting us”, riot police, the shamefully neglectful official response to Hurricane Katrina which demonstrated that poor, predominantly black lives were clearly deemed not to matter. “I like my baby hair and afros. I like my Negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils, ” she sang, offering an education in the Black American experience.
Beyoncé has always been a proud African-American woman and artist. She pursued movie roles in Dream Girls and Cadillac Records. Her wondrously thick thighs became politicized in her Crazy In Love video. There were criticisms with racial undertones when she headlined Glastonbury in 2011. She sang At Last to the Obamas for their inauguration dance. She and fellow Destiny’s Child Kelly Rowland started a charity to help Katrina survivors. Husband Jay-Z has been critical of the injustice of the profitable bail bond industry, with over 400,000 people who have not been convicted of a crime incarcerated simply because they can’t afford bail, often set at less than 5K. Beyoncé didn’t suddenly discover her blackness in 2016. Whether the political climate pushed her over the edge, or becoming a mother to her own Black daughter did it, or she realized that her success and popularity gave her immunity, Beyoncé started using her voice and her platform quite blatantly, and quite brilliantly. There are few people in the world with her kind of power, and she’s been able to snatch back the Black narrative from the fringes and help spotlight it centre stage. But it was also a risk to have her name synonymously linked with black rights, but as she states rather directly in this film, “Let black be synonymous with glory.” If 2016’s Super Bowl half time show was her coming out party, her 2018 Coachella performance cemented her mythic, iconic status. As the first black woman to headline the festival, her show was explicitly black, triumphantly black. Look no further than her documentary Homecoming to see how deliberately, lovingly, boldly she created every element in her show to be marinated in cultural meaning. She didn’t just pay homage to those who came before her, she used her two hour set to unpack a lesson in black music history. She literally used her platform to honour and recognize black art; the performance was a revelation to the predominantly privileged white audience of Coachella, but it created a real moment in time that reached into the hearts and souls of those who could fully appreciated it. Having already achieved pop royalty status, Beyonce is free to make the strong personal and political statements that have defined her career ever since. Her success is no longer measured by mere radio plays; freed from having to abide by what makes her white audience comfortable, she and Jay-Z are reigning from a throne of their own making. She no longer has to shrink or contain her blackness and it’s clearly been a boon to her creativity and craft. Black Is King follows in the footsteps of Lemonade, defiantly blazing her own path, and returning to the African desert that clearly still calls her name.
This visual album is of course an occular and audible delight. It jumps off from The Lion King, swapping lions for Black men and women. It highlights the extremely varied beauty of the African landscape, and of its people. There are set pieces in here where you can readily imagine the ka-ching of literally millions of dollars spent per second of film.
The Gift, Beyoncé’s Lion King-inspired album, takes us beyond Disney’s version of Hollywood’s Africa. Her original contribution to the film’s soundtrack, Spirit, is a gospel-charged anthem, but she didn’t stop there. She found up-and-coming African artists, songwriters, and producers to join her on the album, creating an international vibe with a strong and undeniable heartbeat.
The accompanying film is stuffed with imagery, implication, poetry and practice that feels like such an intimate declaration of love and admiration that I watched on the verge of a constant blush. Even Kelly Rowland felt it, being the recipient of Beyoncé’s sincere serenade, breaking the beaming eye contact with an overwhelmed giggle.
The visual album exists to toast beauty, observe beauty, create beauty, memorialize it. But a visual album from Beyoncé is to define and redefine it, to find beauty in new or forgotten spaces it, to celebrate a spectrum of beauty, to infuse it with ideas of culture and identity, to own it, to actually physically own it. And for that reason, I almost wish I could watch it at half speed. There are so many lavish tableaus set with precision and abundance but only glimpsed for a second or two; I want so badly to just live in that moment, to possess and savour it a minute longer.
And like a true Queen, she steps aside and allows herself to be upstaged by African collaborators, like Busiswa from South Africa, Salatiel from Cameroon and Yemi Alade and Mr Eazi from Nigeria. This album is a show of solidarity, an act of unity. She places herself among them, among the ancient beats and contemporary sound.
A thousand words in, dare I only broach the subject of fashion now? The sheer quantity of couture from Queen B is nearly numbing, except each look is so bold and unique you do your best to keep up to the dazzling, nonstop parade: Valentino, Burberry, Thierry Mugler, Erdem. But also a barage of Black designers from around the world, curated diligently and I’d guess rather exhaustively by Beyonce’s longtime stylist, Zerina Akers: D.Bleu.Dazzled, Loza Maléombho, Lace by Tanaya, Déviant La Vie, Jerome Lamaar, Duckie Confetti, Melissa Simon-Hartman, Adama Amanda Ndiaye…you get the picture. It’s MAJOR, every one of them re-imagining a wardrobe fit for an African Queen, their number so plentiful that no one garment or gown overpowers the beauty of their canvas: brown skin.
Beyoncé surrounds herself with Black beauties, including Naomi Campbell, Adut Akech, and Lupita Nyong’o, but also her own mother, Tina Knowles Lawson, and daughter Blue Ivy. Her family is often presented as a symbol of her strength, young twins Rumi and Sir making appearances as well, equating “kingship” with engaged fatherhood.
There is so much to unpack in this film, from the frenzied and joyous dancing of black bodies, to their posing as sculpture on pedestals, to the recreation of moments from her own storied career, there is more here than I can enumerate let alone appreciate. Like the star herself, Beyoncé’s concept of blackness is a hybrid of her ancestral lands and the country of her birth. It’s an amalgamation of black art and black history and a vision of black power, of ethnic and cultural splendor. And what a time to have dropped it, in a world where white people are just now opening their eyes to the racial injustice and inequality that has yoked people of colour for centuries, where black bodies are being discriminated against at best, black minds suppressed, black art appropriated, black experiences denied. And here is a woman who could easily coast on her laurels but instead is serving her people by framing the Black experience not only in a positive light, but a powerful and empowering one. Black Is King is not a cure for racism, not even a vaccine, but it may just be the booster shot of pride we all need right now.
The animals of the clearing are worried about drought. Collectively they have only 4 pumpkins full of water left, and the sources are drying up, but Latte, a spunky young hedgehog and an outcast from the forest community, has her own small reserve. A young squirrel named Tjum tries to seize her water for the communal coffers but in the ensuing fracas an entire pumpkin is upset, spilling a quarter or more of the clearing’s dwindling water supply. Yikes. The animals are, as always, quick to point the finger at Latte, but this time Tjum recognizes the anti-hedgehog sentiment and takes sole responsibility for the accident.
It’s nice and all but still doesn’t account for the water shortage. Luckily a crow with impeccable timing arrives to tell them all about this mythic waterstone that once rested at the top of bear mountain, allowing water to flow abundantly down to to everyone in the forest and beyond. But then the bear king stole it for himself, leaving all the other animals to go without. Latte resolves then and there to retrieve that stone, and Tjum follows after her. If the bear king doesn’t sound scary enough, they’ll have to cross a perilous forest to get to him, encountering predators like wolves and lynxes who are just as thirsty and even more desperate, not to mention a cockeyed toad whose motivations are mysterious.
Latte & the Magic Waterstone is a German animated film, and German fairy tales aren’t exactly known for their light-hearted joviality. Nobody gets their eyes pecked out (Grimm’s Cinderella) or any kind of blinding (Grimm’s Rapunzel) indeed; eyes are largely safe in this one. But there is some real sadness to contend with: a sweet little hedgehog alone in the world, a community content to shun her. But the movie doesn’t really dwell on such matters. It sticks to its simple and predictable story, an easy little adventure to find or not find a stone that may or may not exist. Dying of thirst or dying of loneliness: what’s the difference?
This movie is occasionally visually stunning and mostly just a forgettable little cartoon about a hedgehog who probably deserves better.
We’ve had to cancel our 2020 Disney World trip due to COVID concerns; yesterday there were more deaths in Florida than there were cases in all of Ontario. Not to mention the Canada-U.S. border has remained closed to keep the virus at bay (Canadians worked hard collectively to shut things down and flatten the curve early on and we don’t want our efforts wasted by an errant American visitor, who’ve played so fast and loose with people’s health).
Disney World closed its gates for many weeks but is now reopened despite an alarming increase in new cases in Florida (and elsewhere of course; Florida is by no means the only American hotspot). For now, our only Disney travel will be in our dreams, and by trips on the nostalgia train with videos like this one.
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Photographer Holly Logan (Jana Kramer) returns to her hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi for Christmas. The town is still recovering from a devastating hurricane five years ago and is resurrecting their traditional holiday light show for the first time since it struck. It’s going to take quite a production to make up for lost time and boost town morale, so Holly volunteers to pitch in, but soon regrets it when she discovers the festival is run by her high school sweetheart, Mike (Wes Brown). Now Holly must spend the next few days with the man who broke her heart when he didn’t follow her to college as planned.
The past decade has perhaps changed Mike: he’s stable, he’s sweet, he volunteers, and he takes care of his nephew Jack. Does he have a job? Who knows! Between those crinkly blue eyes and his acoustic guitar, who cares? Holly’s widowed mother Caroline (Faith Ford) is certainly on board, pushing the two together at every opportunity, even though she herself continues to rebuff the charms of a certain Mr. Maguire (Richard Karn).
With the magic of Christmas wafting through the air and a few silly misunderstandings quickly out of the way, there’s plenty of room for Mike and Holly to fall in love.
Kramer and Brown have the bland kind of appeal which I suppose allows almost anyone to imagine themselves in their shoes. Faith Ford and Richard Karn add a certain 90s vibe to the whole proceeding (you may remember Ford as Corky on Murphy Brown, and Karn as Al on Home Improvement), and you might wish we could see a fuller secondary love story from these second-timers. (Fun fact: my mother’s husband retired this summer, and his kids paid Richard Karn to send him best wishes over the internet in a pre-recorded video – apparently that’s a thing you can do).
This is a Lifetime movie rather than a Hallmark movie, and I know there are devoted camps to both, so if that’s a difference-maker to you, be forewarned (the only real difference that I can discern is that Hallmark always makes you wait until the very last scene for the couple’s first and only kiss, while Lifetime makes you wait only the first 90 minutes (counting commercials) and then maybe sneaks in another one or two (pecks, closed mouths, no tongues) before the film wraps up in the exact same way a Hallmark one does. These movies don’t literally end on a heart-shaped dissolve, but they don’t have to – you can feel it. It is heavy like a hard cheese, and that, my friends, is no coincidence. Peace out.
Molly (Jen Lilley) is the genius inventor of the soon to be wildly popular app, Mingle All The Way. In case you can’t tell from the name, it’s a “networking” app intended for professionals to find like-minded plus-ones to attend work-related events. No romance, strictly a platonic partnership of strategic convenience. Of course, Molly is merely the founder of her own “tech company,” she never imagined she’d ever have to stoop so low as to actually use her own app. Gross. But alas, a potential investor is requiring it. You know, if you’re going to pony up a million dollars, you do want the person who stands to profit to provide a single instance of anecdotal evidence. It’s called due diligence. So Molly’s own algorithm matches her with Jeff (Brant Daugherty), who’s either a lawyer or an ad executive (I can’t remember which but it’s definitely one of the two because it’s ALWAYS one of the two), whom she instantly recognizes as the scoundrel who stole the last angel right from under her nose at the extremely Hallmark-esque card and ornament shop that morning. Cad! And now she’s committed to attending several Christmas functions with him!
Well, guys, you won’t have seen this coming, but although they’re keeping things super strictly above-board and hands-to-themselves, they somehow fall in love anyway. Which is basically egg(nog) on Molly’s face because of how very, very seriously her app markets itself as anti-dating, 100% professionalism-only guaranteed. Who would want an app that pairs socially inept weirdos romantically? In fact, more than not tanking her business, Molly’s #1 priority is making her mother proud of her. And truth be told, I don’t think Molly’s mom even knows what an app is, or why her daughter can’t get her own dates.
Anyway. What can I say, it’s a Hallmark movie. The characters are rather shameless and you might be downright embarrassed for them if they weren’t also so guileless. It’s a combination that works well for Hallmark: good old fashioned naivety and a G-rated, friends-first romance. Hey, it works if you work it!
In 1989, a man named Dennis, his identity shrouded in shadows, his voice distorted, gave an explosive interview claiming he worked on UFOs in a government lab called s-4.
We have since come to know his true identity, Bob Lazar, and to refer to that particular place in northern Las Vegas as Area 51. Bob claims his work there involved the reverse-engineering an alien propulsion system, technology that even 30 years later still cannot be replicated by humans.
Do you believe Bob Lazar? Lazar doesn’t care. He came forward because he felt his fellow Americans deserved to know what the government was hiding from them, but he never wanted to be in the spotlight and he certainly didn’t expect to be the face of UFOlogy for the next three decades. His testimony is both the most controversial and also the most important contribution to the UFO narrative of all time. But life hasn’t exactly rewarded him for his whistleblowing, if you consider what he did to be whistleblowing. He’s either an American hero or a traitor or a nutbar.
The UFO that he claims to have seen supposedly ran on an antimatter reactor fueled by element 115, which generated a gravity wave which allowed for movement but also camouflage by bending light around it. At the time element 115 had not yet been artificially created (it was in 2003 and officially named moscovium, but no stable isotopes of moscovium have ever been synthesized, all of them radioactive and decaying in fractions of a second). Lazar claimed to have seen documents referring to little green aliens as having contacted humans on Earth for the past ten thousand years.
Is Lazar a total kook or just a lousy secret keeper? That’s what this documentary seems intent on establishing: not whether UFOs exist and have visited this planet, but whether Lazar is a nice, honest man. Very little new information is offered and Lazar basically gets the stage to himself. This film by Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell is unlikely to sway people’s opinion one way or another, but Corbell’s stance is pretty clear since he glosses over Lazar’s 1990 arrest for aiding and abetting a prostitution ring. This was reduced to felony pandering (the procuring of a person to be used for prostitution, including inducing, encouraging, or forcing someone to engage in prostitution), to which he pleaded guilty. He was also charged in 2006 for shipping restricted chemicals across state lines, pleading guilty to three criminal counts of aiding and abetting the introduction into interstate commerce banned hazardous substances. Possibly these charges are a result of the government keeping tabs on his whereabouts, and possibly Lazar’s just not as nice as he likes to pretend. Either way, even Lazar himself admits he has no way of proving that what he says is true. So it all comes down to you.
Do you believe in aliens?
In UFOs?
That the American government is hiding aliens or UFOs or both in Area 51?
You’d have to be desperate to accept a job in Norway’s Arctic Circle painting a barn alongside a gruff, acerbic artist during the months when the sun never sets. But desperate she is; Frances (Jenny Slate) is technically homeless after her own breakup, and her parents’, which dissolves the family home. She’s an artist, but not the kind who’s been first choice for any apprenticeship back home. Hence the sunlight nights.
She spends her days painting a barn yellow under the direction of cantankerous Nils (Fridtjov Såheim), her evenings making friends with goats and brown cheese, and her nights not sleeping as the sun’s rays continuously penetrate the windows of her camper. She meets Haldor (Zach Galifianakis) an American who plays a Viking Chief in a nearby “authentic,” “historic” Viking village settlement meant to attract tourists, though there are few, and Yasha (Alex Sharp), who has traveled here to give his recently deceased father a proper Viking funeral.
There’s nothing like self-exile to establish a sense of grief and apathy. I imagine Martin Ahlgren had a cinematographer’s wet dream up there with those incredible, sparkling landscapes. Jenny Slate is her usual effervescent self. But though the film is often charming, it doesn’t really feel complete. Frances often refers to her time in Norway as “detention,” a punishment for not being successful. With time it becomes the site of her awakening, her renaissance as an artist – but it’s unclear to both the audience and to the film itself whether Frances has undergone a permanent transformation. The film lacks commitment, it all feels rather passive. I found things to admire but was left feeling vaguely unsatisfied.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 