Change Your Image
paulandrewkimball
Reviews
Your Money or Your Wife (2015)
First feature by Iain MacLeod delivers laughs and heart
When his girlfriend dumps him, the meek and mild Lionel (Craig Brown) goes to a bar, gets drunk, and passes out on the wintry walk home after a drunken vision leads him into someone's else garage. When he wakes up the next day he is confronted by the gun-toting homeowner Warren (Brian MacQuarrie), who mistakes Lionel for a mysterious master criminal named Mike with whom Warren and his wife Elsie (Anna Valentina) have signed on to conduct a burglary (without ever having met him, naturally). Lionel becomes an unwilling accomplice in an incompetent home invasion where he meets and falls for the homeowner, Annie (Meredith MacNeil). If this all sounds implausibly silly, that's because it is, which is why it's so much fun! First-time feature director Iain MacLeod (who also penned the screenplay) just keeps ramping up the jokes and situational humour in this screwball romantic comedy to the point where even the most hardened cynic will find it impossible not to get caught up in the laughs. Your Money or Your Wife is played with a lot of good-natured verve, and features hilarious turns by the entire cast (MacQuarrie was my favourite, although an extended cameo by Josh MacDonald as Annie's husband almost steals the show), and highlights some charming heart- of-gold chemistry between Brown and MacNeil in the romantic subplot. Quintessential Canadian humour that's accessible to everyone, it's the kind of film that will make you want to see what MacLeod comes up with next.
Roaming (2013)
A flawed but promising first feature for Michael Ray Fox
It's not easy making a full-blown feature film on CAD $150,000. It's even harder when you're the first film as part of an ambitious funding initiative by two government funding agencies (Film NS and Telefilm Canada's First feature Program), something that brings with it the weight of expectations. And it's hardest of all when you actually try to tell a serious story with complex characters, as opposed to just slathering on some zombie make-up and locking a few people in a cabin in the woods.
Is Roaming perfect? Far from it. It's a deeply flawed film in many respects (including some basic technical areas in the screening I saw at the 2012 Atlantic Film Festival, where the sound was often murky, and in a few cases botched completely), but even with those flaws Roaming is an ambitious film worth seeking out. It contains a riveting performance by Rhys Bevan-John in the lead role as a socially awkward (and perhaps autistic) would-be video game designer who is just seeking to establish some sort of "human" connection not only with the people around him, but with himself. There's solid supporting work by the rest of the largely unknown cast, and some clever dialogue and well thought out scenes. Most of all, it shows that Michael Ray Fox is a director and writer of promise and vision.