Reviews: 'Passchendaele,' 'Zack and Miri'

PASSCHENDAELE - ***

In short: A sometimes good, sometimes great film with a really lousy ending.

I assume everyone involved with making this thing knew a lot was riding on their work. This was the movie that was finally going put Canadian film on the map. Apart from being the highest-budget Canadian film ever made, matters of national pride and Canadian identity around the world were at stake, and all this may have been a little much to lay on the shoulders of one Paul Gross, a metaphor he himself takes a bit too literally in the film's final scenes. More on that in a minute. I don't understand the writer/director/star syndrome, even in a project as personal as this was to Gross you'd think that telling everyone else what to do would cement his auteur status, but Gross insists on doing everything by himself, including the sometimes jarringly dated and out of place musical score. The result of a director stretched too thin is an uneven film, and yet for every half-hearted line or clumsy characterization there's an original scene or neat bit of plotting to make up for it, so on the whole, the flaws are forgivable. What is not forgivable is the film's absurd climax, a horrifically earnest passion-play (passchen-play?) that's about as far removed from 'subtle' as a film can easily get. I don't blame Gross for this scene, he was too close to the material to be remotely objective about it, I even admire the script's willingness to 'go big or go home,' I only wish that someone who knew what was at stake had had the balls to say "Paul, this is bad. Really bad. Hilariously bad. And I won't let you do it." I'll let you see it for yourself if you haven't, but it makes the rest of the film seem laughable, and it doesn't deserve that. There's good, world-class stuff here, the opening in particular is downright great, and it's a shame the solid filmmaking was finally brought down by its boundless ambition. I suppose you can't have one without the other, though.

ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO - ****

In short: In the sex comedy genre, Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow and Kevin Smith can hardly go wrong together. A solid, if somewhat routine genre outing.

I really think this is Kevin Smith's best film. In a way it's exactly what you'd expect, but Smith has a love of dingy New Jersey suburbs and strip malls that let him see beauty and humanity in the soul-crushing industrial wasteland, and the leads work hard to get a lot of good material out of their characters. Don't let the title fool you, this film is more sweet than raunchy, in spite of some decidedly off-colour gags. It's really just another low-key character driven comedy of which there is no shortage, but it proves that with the right oversight and polish, Kevin Smith can still bang out a more than decent movie, which is good news to those of us who are embarrassed to note that we once idolized him. The third act has been called awful, and perhaps it's mis-handled, but after Chasing Amy, it wasn't totally out of left field.