Film reviews x2: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, and Scarlet

If the winter blues have got you down, I highly recommend Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Rating: ✭✭✭✭), Matt Johnson’s Toronto-centric gonzo comedy that acts as a love letter to the city, movies, creative ingenuity and friendship. Make sure you see it in a packed movie theatre in the GTA. It’ll really increase the fun.

Matt and Jay (played by Johnson and co-writer/composer Jay McCarrol) have long wanted to play the legendary Rivoli — a desire that pretty much fuelled the web and TV series Nirvana the Band the Show and Nirvanna the Band the Show. At the top of the film, they hatch a brilliant (to them) idea of jumping off the CN Tower’s EdgeWalk attraction and parachuting into the SkyDome to announce their gig just a few blocks north.

Never mind that they aren’t booked to play the Rivoli. They’ll figure that out when it comes. And never mind that the stadium’s retractable roof is about to close.

When the stunt backfires — and I’m still not sure how they captured it so convincingly, complete with security guards — they regroup. And what they come up with is something even more outlandish involving an RV, a spilt bottle of Orbitz (remember those?) and a home-made flux capacitor that, of course, acts as a loving homage to the Back to the Future movies.

This, in turn, takes them back to 2008, where they get to spy on their younger selves (thanks to the webseries footage), include lots of visual gags about male celebrities who are now cancelled (or news and entertainment weeklies that are now defunct) and tinker with the future by making a couple of changes.

The two actors have a blast both as their schlubby present-day versions and their slightly altered (in Jay’s case much altered) selves, sometimes improvising with people on the street and inserting themselves into real-life scenarios. One ingenious sequence was captured after the high-profile shooting last summer at Drake’s mansion in the Bridle Path.

Sure, they take liberties with the city’s geography a bit (oh for a movie theatre at Queen and University), but that’s to be expected when the comic and dramatic payoffs are so big.

The final act is too much fun to spoil. Let’s just say it’s extremely exciting and improbably moving. McCarrol, who wrote the film’s songs, is a great straight man to his extroverted on-screen partner. Johnson, decked out in his beige hat and crumpled sports jacket, is like some millennial Chaplin by way of Duddy Kravitz, capable of making you laugh one moment, cry the next.

The best thing about the film? Like those Back to the Future movies, not long after watching it you’ll want to see it again.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie opens Feb. 13.

Scarlet fever

So it turns out Hamnet isn’t the only feature film this season to draw on Shakespeare’s best-known tragedy.

There’s also Scarlet (Rating: ✭✭✭), Mamoru Hosoda’s anime epic that takes the bones of the play’s plot and places it in a completely different universe.

In war-torn 16th-century Denmark, King Amleth (Masachika Ichimura) would rather talk with his enemies than fight them. His brother Claudius (Kôji Yakusho) — who’s already sleeping with his wife, Gertrude — frames him for treason, and promptly has him executed. The young princess Scarlet (Mana Ashida) witnesses this, but doesn’t learn about her father’s final words until much later.

When she, Claudius and a bunch of the play’s dramatis personae die, they find themselves in a purgatory world, all in search of the “Infinite Land,” where they’ll presumably be able to live forever. Scarlet befriends Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a contemporary medic (also dead) whose pacifist stance contrasts with her thirst for vengeance.

Hosoda (Oscar-nominated for Mirai) fails to explain why so many Elsinore citizens died in the first place. (I guess something really was rotten in the state of Denmark.) Sure, Claudius and Scarlet drank poison, but how did the others meet their ends? Where is Laertes in all this? And why doesn’t Scarlet seek out her dad for some advice?

It also feels like a missed opportunity to ignore what happens to Gertrude (Yuki Saitô), who was left in the “real world” after her second husband and daughter died. Does she feel any remorse?

Still, some of the visual backdrops, particularly of crowd scenes and vast, cavernous landscapes, are impressive — you can appreciate them in IMAX this week. (The film extends to regular theatres next week.)

And there’s charm of a different sort in watching two characters from different universes learn about each other’s cultures. At last year’s Venice Film Festival, Scarlet and Hijiri won the Nave d’Argento for Best OTP (One True Pairing), an award celebrating fan-favourite couples.

So there’s that.

Scarlet is now playing in IMAX theatres and opens in more theatres Feb. 13

Coming soon: Winter review roundup #3: You, Always, Through the Eyes of God, Eureka Day; an interview with Eureka Day’s Jake Epstein and Sarah McVie; and more