Victoria Film Festival Reviews
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RATING: 4
Toronto filmmaker Bruce McDonald is "caught inside my own frame," as his fictional self says in his dizzyingly absurd and at times, unexpectedly tender followup to his 1996 cult hit, a quasi-documentary about a legendary Vancouver punk band's disastrous comeback tour. In wisely opting not to repeat themselves, McDonald and co-writer David Griffith have triumphed with a vastly different and more stationary animal, yet his cheekiness and flair for inspired juxtapositions is intact as he references the original. This time out, McDonald increases the profile of his alter-ego, the filmmaker who returns to Canada after a lucrative Hollywood career. His new mission takes McDonald and a Wiccan video artist to a Saskatchewan dance hall where Bucky Haight, the original's cadaverous punk legend, is producing an album for punk band Die Mannequin's lead singer Care Failure, who resembles a cross between Courtney Love and Catherine O'Hara and claims she's inhabited by the spirit of Joe Dick, the rocker who committed suicide in the original. This brilliantly edited film is at once contemplative and an over-the-top rush with a killer soundtrack. Just don't expect a carbon copy of the original.