It has a similar feel to their sketches, but obviously in a much longer format.
I really enjoyed how much more coherent it is in summary than experience. It is possible to envision a version of the same story which is satirical but also realist; Brain Candy isn't it. It's full of little scattershot side sketches and at least two musical numbers and permanent Monty Python drag. The prevailing tone is detached, deadpan, and surreal. In a halfway normal comedy, the hero would be endearingly geeky; played by Kevin McDonald, he's desperately awkward, a socially flailing bundle of insecurities who can be railroaded into nearly destroying humanity, while his love interest is just as overheated and inarticulate and their two other coworkers are safer and saner only by default and/or apathy. Having run its plot into the dead end of pharmaceutical apocalypse, the film scrapes itself out an absurdist happy ending which finds its antiheroic scientists industriously working to restore misery to the human race. Much to my surprise, I thought it was great! I'm just not at all surprised that on release it sank like a stone.
This is a city with a strong undercurrent of weirdness but desperately convinced that it's boringly normal.
What are other iconic manifestations of Toronto-ness in art, other than Gemma's fiction? (I think my first exposure to Toronto as an actual setting rather than a stand-in was Forever Knight, which may or may not support your thesis.)
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I really enjoyed how much more coherent it is in summary than experience. It is possible to envision a version of the same story which is satirical but also realist; Brain Candy isn't it. It's full of little scattershot side sketches and at least two musical numbers and permanent Monty Python drag. The prevailing tone is detached, deadpan, and surreal. In a halfway normal comedy, the hero would be endearingly geeky; played by Kevin McDonald, he's desperately awkward, a socially flailing bundle of insecurities who can be railroaded into nearly destroying humanity, while his love interest is just as overheated and inarticulate and their two other coworkers are safer and saner only by default and/or apathy. Having run its plot into the dead end of pharmaceutical apocalypse, the film scrapes itself out an absurdist happy ending which finds its antiheroic scientists industriously working to restore misery to the human race. Much to my surprise, I thought it was great! I'm just not at all surprised that on release it sank like a stone.
This is a city with a strong undercurrent of weirdness but desperately convinced that it's boringly normal.
What are other iconic manifestations of Toronto-ness in art, other than Gemma's fiction? (I think my first exposure to Toronto as an actual setting rather than a stand-in was Forever Knight, which may or may not support your thesis.)