The Future is Now!: So think positive!

Who is the Man of Today? Someone “pessemistic and practical,” says he. A “libertarian,” says another. Someone who just needs a few days wholly devoted to rediscovering the sense of wonder that stubbornly continues to exist in our troubled world, says the Woman of Tomorrow, who then promptly sets about fascilatating that rediscovery, through poetry readings, drinks with anarchists and helicopter tours of the Chrystler Building and the Great Wall of China, followed by meetings with several renowned optimists in North America and Europe. Man of Today met Woman of Tomorrow while the latter was doing a video street survey, asking strangers what their biggest fears are. (My favourite answer was “mystery moisture,” that phenomenon that occurs when you’re just walking along and you get hit by a drop of liquid of no apparent origin.) Woman is impressed by Man’s resolute I-do-no-harm, nor-do-I-give-a-shit-about-others attitutde. Man is impressed by Woman’s perky attractiveness. The adventure begins.

Alain de Botton

This fateful encounter between Woman and Man forms the foudnation of Gary Burns and Jim Brown’s The Future is Now!, a sort of fantasy date-a-thon that takes its cues from Nicole Védrès 1949 film La vie commence demain, in which two people with similarly conflicting sensibilities meet and swap ideas with French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel Agache, Jean Rostand, Le Corbusier, Pablo Picasso and André Gide. Burns and Brown’s cast of big-brained conversationalists are a little less famous but also a little more diverse in background, they include Toronto poet Christian Bök, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, artist Marlene Dumas, philosopher Alain de Botton and novelist Rivka Galchen (whose Atmospheric Distrubances was one of the best debuts of the last decade). Oh, and the ghost of Jean-Paul Sartre. The tone and format feels somewhat akin to Richard Linklater’s talkier films (Waking Life espeically) and, to a lesser extent, Mindwalk, that slightly goofy movie where Liv Ullman, John Heard and Sam Waterston just walk around and talk about ultruism.





Burns and Brown previousy collaborated on the terrific Radiant City, which took a similarly irreverent approach to the documentary format in its exploraiton of Calgary’s apocalytic urban sprawl. The Future is Now! is also somehow a very Calgarian movie, in that it feels like the work of artists who are enormously frustrated with their hometown’s rabid conservatism yet come to terms with it not through attacking it but rather through giving certain dominant conservative attitudes a plausible, intelligent voice. Man of Today isn’t one to easily buy into liberal idealism, and thus makes a nice foil to Woman of Tomorrow’s incessant cheerfulness (she’s played by Liane Balaban). Man is played by bald-headed Quebecois Paul Ahmarani, who is nothing if not persistent. The film is full of reaction shots that find him doing this “I’m dubious” face, which made me laugh out loud nearly every time. I found myself occasionally wishing Burns and Brown had allowed their Man character to have a little more, well, character, but the truth is that both Man and Woman’s cipher-like personas fit neatly into the film’s conciet, which essentially takes the premise for a children’s movie and grafts it onto a film for grown-ups. I think it’s a lot of fun. But maybe I’m a natural optimist.

Death makes a holiday: One Week

There are those painful things in life that movies rarely render in a way that truly resonates, that elevates the material above a level of facile catharsis or emotional pornography. Atrocities, life imprisonment, genocides, tax audits, terminal cancer. Yet that last one, however daunting, never goes too long without some fresh taker eager to step up to the plate and give it a whack. Most often, it seems the younger the afflicted protagonist, the better. You know how it is. Die young, leave a beautiful blah-blah-blah. You’d roll your eyes if they weren’t so full of tears.

Among the virtues of One Week, our most recent entry into this fraught subgenre, is its ability to avoid getting too bogged down in the despair of being young, hopeful and ostensibly healthy only to suddenly find out Death’s in the waiting room checking his watch. Written and directed by Michael McGowan (Saint Ralph), this decidedly quirky road movie, narrated by some anonymous literary sage (actually Campbell Scott) with a great deal of privileged knowledge, is so thoroughly infused with winky little detours into flashback and fantasy, into little anecdotes about what happened to characters met briefly en route by our hero, that it attains a welcome layer of detachment, something that helps to stave off the inert bathos that is so often the cancer of cancer movies. If only this same approach could also keep One Week from succumbing to cheap national boosterism and a palette of locations and vistas that amounted to something more than what feels like an extended advert for Canadian tourism or, worse, a telecommunications provider. (The truly lame sub-Coldplay score doesn't help.) Torontonian Ben (Joshua Jackson) sheds his everyday obligations and hits the road after getting his death sentence in part because he realizes that he never wanted to live a life of passive conformity. Yet the greatest hits itinerary of his cross-Canada trek sure feels like the same one your polyester-slacked grandparents would take, albeit in a Winnebago instead of a gorgeous old Norton.

Ben’s engage to Samantha (Liane Balaban of Last Chance Harvey, underused), a pretty actuary. He’s a failed novelist-turned schoolteacher, a guy who’s just too damned nice to really pursue his dreams with the necessary rigor. Cancer may very well extinguish his life with brutal efficiency, but it does give him the gift of gumption. He buys the motorbike on a whim. He takes up a spookily-apt proposal found inside the rim of a cup of Timmy’s and goes west on his own instead of going in for debilitating treatments. He takes photos of giant objects, stumbles upon the Stanley Cup, smokes reefer with Gord Downie—admittedly, pretty cool. He takes a horseback ride in Saskatchewan, where he most improbably drinks Steam Whistle with a horny farmer. (Product placement trumps verisimilitude.) He gets lost in the woods in Banff and surfs off of Vancouver Island. As I recall, I don’t think anything happens to him in Manitoba, alas. Along the way he considers what really matters, lists life’s compromises, and ponders the deep subjectivity of food odour, an issue never resolved.

If looming death doesn’t over-burden One Week, it hardly injects it with a great deal of urgency either. Jackson emanates sweetness and familiarity, but can’t seem to convey the minimal panic, revelation and/or insanity required by the situation. McGowan falls back on sentimentality and staying shackled to over-prudent story editing when he could have chosen to explore at least a couple of roads less traveled, which is the secret gift waiting inside the road movie for those willing to roll with it. So One Week is often a bit dull, sometimes wince-worthy, yet so genuinely good-natured you still walk out kinda rooting for it, hoping that its title isn’t a prediction for how long it’ll last in theatres.