I Like Movies – Film Review
by Brian Merriman

Written and Directed by Chandler Levack
Music by Murray Lightburn
Stars – Isaiah Lehtinen, Percy Hynes White, Anand Rajaram

‘I Like Movies’ has been acclaimed as a ‘breakthrough’ movie for award-winning writer and director Chandler Levack and some of its leading actors.  It is billed as a comedy-drama, but I have to admit if it is, both elements escaped me. The home-movie opening sequence set the movie up and it rarely moved from that low-budget feel.

There is much publicity about it showcasing themes such as misogyny, sexual assault and suicide but it’s almost a defence of the deficiencies in this disjointed piece. The central character 17-year-old high school student Lawrence Kweller, played by Isaiah Lehtinen, is irritating in his construction and delivery. There is a reference to a similarity to Danny De Vito in the script, but De Vito is a comedian, and Lawrence is an emotionally detached diva. Neither he nor any of the characters connect throughout the abrupt stereotypical scenarios. How can we laugh – we’ve seen it many times before?

Lawrence is as obsessed with himself as he is with movies. He goes to work in a video rental shop to afford the films he wants to see and apparently to save up the US$90,000 for college fees in New York. He betrays his few friends and has zero regard for women in this piece. He screws up time and again with serious consequences for those around him.

Alana (Romina D’Ugo) his would-be actress boss, and Terri Kweller (Lawrence’s mother played by Krista Bridges) work hard to help Lawrence mature but they bear the brunt of his behavioural excesses. Percy Hynes White as Matt Macarchuck offers a glimmer of hope for the artistic standards of the piece, but just as he becomes interesting, he is sidelined in the plot and goes missing from the screen long enough to reduce him from being potentially part of a ‘coming of age’ two-hander, to a lesser role.

The scenes where Lawrence is ‘coming of age’ are predictable and trite. It feels at times, that the cast is having fun ‘backstage’ sending the script up and overplaying the one-dimensional teenage characters.

It is insufficient for any comedy to rely on the audience ‘getting’ its wavelength. That is the job of the writer and director. Comedy needs at least one likeable character to resonate, one that’s either clever and in control, or the hapless foil that always loses out hilariously. There is no such character in ‘I Like Movies’ and the film really misses out. I still like movies, but I found far too little to like in this one.