I really wanted this low-budget film to succeed, but it falls short in my opinion. It was filmed in the seedy section of Parkdale in west Toronto, and I loved the familiar street scenes. But this is a movie that seems to revel in its own misery. Writer/director Ed Gass-Donnelly calls the film 'dark,' but it's more than that: it's unpleasant in the extreme.
***SPOILERS
There seems to be no space at all for the characters to go except down. Even the yuppie couple (the lovely Caroline Cave and handsome Noam Jenkins) descend into dissipation bordering on cliché. I wanted to root for SOMEBODY in this flick, but all the characters, with the possible exception of Peter (Stuart Hughes), as a cop on medical leave, insisted on destroying themselves.
Five characters intersect around a Parkdale apartment building on Toronto's Queen Street West. One is a crack whore (Kristin Booth), who is hopelessly entwined with a tortured, crack-addicted dreamer (Aaron Poole). Through a series of convoluted mishaps, both characters become connected to Harry (Jenkins), husband of Carole (Cave), who herself gets connected to Hughes's cop, who himself is the father of Booth's character. It sounds more confusing than it really is.
What I found really irritating about this film (the DVD at least) was the terrible audio, which required me to crank up the volume almost to maximum just to hear some of the dialogue. Low-budget film or not, the sound, of all things, should not sabotage a film.
A really interesting aspect of the film is that the chain of events that leads to the break-up of a marriage, to death and the destruction of dreams, was an accident (or perhaps, director Gass-Donnelly seems to suggest, it isn't). In any case, Carole falls from her condo apartment, and her disfigurement from this mishap not only causes her marriage to fall apart but galvanizes the other events that lead to the characters becoming involved directly or indirectly in her plight. Life does in fact sometimes work that way. But even in real life, there is a hint of redemption. No one is redeemed in this film.
***SPOILERS
There seems to be no space at all for the characters to go except down. Even the yuppie couple (the lovely Caroline Cave and handsome Noam Jenkins) descend into dissipation bordering on cliché. I wanted to root for SOMEBODY in this flick, but all the characters, with the possible exception of Peter (Stuart Hughes), as a cop on medical leave, insisted on destroying themselves.
Five characters intersect around a Parkdale apartment building on Toronto's Queen Street West. One is a crack whore (Kristin Booth), who is hopelessly entwined with a tortured, crack-addicted dreamer (Aaron Poole). Through a series of convoluted mishaps, both characters become connected to Harry (Jenkins), husband of Carole (Cave), who herself gets connected to Hughes's cop, who himself is the father of Booth's character. It sounds more confusing than it really is.
What I found really irritating about this film (the DVD at least) was the terrible audio, which required me to crank up the volume almost to maximum just to hear some of the dialogue. Low-budget film or not, the sound, of all things, should not sabotage a film.
A really interesting aspect of the film is that the chain of events that leads to the break-up of a marriage, to death and the destruction of dreams, was an accident (or perhaps, director Gass-Donnelly seems to suggest, it isn't). In any case, Carole falls from her condo apartment, and her disfigurement from this mishap not only causes her marriage to fall apart but galvanizes the other events that lead to the characters becoming involved directly or indirectly in her plight. Life does in fact sometimes work that way. But even in real life, there is a hint of redemption. No one is redeemed in this film.
