Childstar

I saw Don McKellar's new movie, Childstar, last Wednesday and I really enjoyed it. McKellar stars in it and plays the part of an unsuccessful independent Canadian film director. I always love it when directors create parts based on how they see themselves. Hamlet would be the first that I can point to of a character like this, as it's been said that Hamlet was the only Shakespeare character that would have been capable of writing Shakespeare's plays. Similarly, McKellar's character in Childstar seems to know exactly the nature of every character and situation, even if he gets duped and fooled by even a 12-year-old child actor, it seems in the end that events were meant to turn out that way and even though McKellar's character was merely on the scene as a limousine driver, he immediately becomes the one the other characters ask advice of and trust to help them.

He even does a very cool trick with the timeline that further blurs the line between the director Don McKellar and the character of this would-be director on the screen. The whole thing gets incredibly meta when the movie-within-a-movie is shown playing at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Childstar itself also played.

The other great thing about Childstar is just how Canadian it is. I've been to a few of the Toronto locations that are mentioned or shown in the film, and it all has a very real-ish atmosphere to it.

The movie being made in Childstar is a vision of the most perfectly awful Hollywood family / action picture, where the son of the President has to rescue his kidnapped father and gets to fly an F16 to intercept Air Force One. (Perhaps this bit of satire was a pre-emptive strike by McKellar to possibly prevent such a film from actually getting made.) Despite how silly it's made to seem, there is still a grudging respect for just how difficult it is to produce a Hollywood film. There is one crisis after another, clashing egos, time and money constraints, and the realization in the back of everyone's mind that they are producing crap but still have to work incredibly hard to make it look good.

But McKellar does indulge a little and inserts a line where the Hollywood director tells the indie director that he wants to make films like him some day.

And in the end McKellar's character pulls it off so that the joke is on the rest of the world. But he does have to sell a little piece of his soul to do it. Welcome to Hollywood.

Of course the very best part of the movie is Alan Thicke playing an actor typecast as a TV dad. It was absolutely perfect.