I’m going to make my second exception in a few years to write about this movie, because I think it’s bad enough that it warrants a warning label. This movie had a glacial roll out: premiering at TIFF in 2023 and then getting a wide release in Canada the following spring, but not receiving a wide release into the US for another year and a half after that. So, despite this movie being several years old, it has only really been accessible on VOD for a few months. I feel angry that I got catfished by an algorithm into watching this movie: “A socially inept 17-year-old cinephile gets a job at a video store, where he forms a complicated friendship with his manager.” I was expecting that I was going to have a fun time watching a movie about movies and maybe chuckling over some rant that the writers would inject into the mouth of their best friend characters over some obscure scene in some classic from the 90s or whatever, and there is nothing that could be farther from that than this movie. The fact that it takes place in the city of Toronto in the 90s just drives home the point that it has to be that much more terrible in order to overcome the natural home game advantage of being a movie that takes place in Toronto (the F word, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, but also just the wholesale lifting of the nostalgic time period of Superbad and Napoleon Dynamite, not to mention the screwball droll of Nirvana the Band the Show). This movie is ALSO a high school movie, which makes it all the more insane that it finds a way to be wholly devoid of the sparks of genius that come with having young actors make their mark on a story (think Saorise Ronan in Ladybird or the leads of Booksmart, Hailee Steinfeld in Edge of Seventeen and Zoey Deutsch in Everybody Wants Some, Blockers–and for those of you wondering if guys can get their start as awkward yet affable kids in high school movies, look no further than Donny Darko, the entirety of the Stranger Things cast, the HP franchise, Jessie Eisenberg made an entire career off of his awkward high school roles)! This is Percy Hynes White at the height of his power in the early days of the Wednesday craze and yet his anemic performance as the best friend to a thoroughly uncharismatic Lawrence Kweller (played by Isaiah Lehtinen) drags. Lehtinen himself vacillates between playing a liberal stereotype and a conservative bogeyman for all of his coded trauma and disabilities, which everyone tiptoes clumsily around at all times. The politics of the movie are a little hard to pin down, because we’re getting things from Kweller’s point of view, which casts the motives of his bestie and the media teacher (?) at his high school in a suspicious light when they–for instance–elevate a young woman of color to a position as showrunner for the prestigious end of year retrospective. It’s hard to tell what’s writer-director Chandler Levack’s axe to grind with cancel culture progressivism that has gone too far and what is satire of satire, but the movie takes a decisively nasty dip in quality once it deploys trauma as plot (Skeleton Twins is maybe the prototypical example, but the sequel to IT features this pretty prominently) in the second act with Alana’s (played capably by Romina D’Ugo) lore drop monologue. All while nary a movie is discussed or shown. This movie is cringe earnest without the character you care about enough to come out of your shell, cringe tumblr without any of the complexity, cringe mess without the quotes to make it camp. Instead it’s just too much and too little at the same time.
So, if for whatever reason, you get to this review before you click on this movie, I have a couple of recommendations for what I wish I had seen instead: first off, Colin Meloy’s book The Stars Did Wander Darkling is one of the most pleasant and meta uses of a video store in a story (featuring high school kids as well!). Second, if you don’t have time to read an entire book and need a meta movie about movies in a pinch: Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl.
