Events Transpiring is a quietly funny nostalgia tour of high school life in Calgary 1999. The film features comic heavyweight Andrew Phung (Kim’s Convenience) and an ensemble cast of lovable young actors, dispensing hot takes on everything from The Matrix to Coach Phil Jackson to former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and everything in between. The humor burns low and slow in the vein of The Dead Don’t Die, where the jokes land because they sail over the heads of everyone on screen. The pop culture sendups to video games and 90s music make for a rich background without feeling cloying or forced. Gags like when the players narrate the prowess of their basketball rivals rather than showing the image makes the movie feel a little bit more like a play. I wonder how different the effect would’ve been if we had had the camera trained on the boys while out of focus we watched player after player from the other team dunk wordlessly. The transitions between the game, the extremist theater players, the dutiful and cerebral janitor, and the drama playing out between one of the refs and his wife Karen keep the movie at a fast clip that never drags. There are some visual jokes that show the marks of a playful director of photography: the mise en abyme photograph of a piano in front of a piano as boys play hackeysack and discuss Chinese philosophy, the inspirational posters plastered throughout the campus feel cheeky in their deployment, and even the opening scene with the plaque declaring, “Be Fans … Not Fanatics!”
This movie does all the things one want with a small indie film about a basketball game in Canada in the 90s, and it is greater than the sum of its parts. The cast is satisfyingly diverse and though it doesn’t have too much to say about activism or consciousness, the way that it aspires and turns ceaselessly over and over in its script with these issues feels like it captures the essence of the high school experience.
