Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Isaiah Lehtinen, Romina D’Ugo, Alex Ateah, Andy McQueen, Krista Bridges
Intro:
There’s a genuine feeling of deep and thorough catharsis in I Like Movies that is immensely affecting.
The lead of writer-director Chandler Levack’s feature debut is 17-year-old Lawrence (Isaiah Lehtinen), an avid film fan who dreams of leaving Canada and studying the craft in New York. He’s the kind of kid who (to paraphrase Mindy from Scream VI) has a Letterboxd account instead of a personality, always talking about how much he loves PTA and Stanley Kubrick to anyone in earshot. It gets to the point where he gets a job at a local video store solely to get in on the employee discount for weekly rentals.
Lehtinen does a great job, effectively breaking away from the Hallmark and Disney Channel work he’s been doing up to this point to give an all-too-vivid depiction of a kid who, to be brutally honest, is quite the little shit. Much like The Edge of Seventeen and Lady Bird, his coming-of-age arc comes in the form of hard lessons about how to properly interact with others and not being solely concerned just about what he wants. To that end, Romina D’Ugo as Alana, the manager of the video store, is the reluctant mentor, even giving him the young cinephile version of the ‘Santa Claus isn’t real’ conversation when she talks about why she isn’t that fond of movies herself.
Through its upfront sense of humour, the depiction of Lawrence and his uphill struggle to learn social skills, this is a difficult watch if you have even a modicum of recollection of going through a similar process; of learning that not every conversation is about you and what you have to say, learning to actually connect with others beyond just shared pop culture intake, and owning up to your mistakes because they can’t just be walked-back.
I Like Movies is an antidote to the more recent trend of filmmakers waxing lyrical about their childhoods and how much cinema means to them (Belfast, Apollo 10 ½, Armageddon Time, The Fabelmans, even later-life outliers like Bardo and Empire of Light). What Levack does here is expose the inherent narcissism in that mindset, instead looking at how that much devotion to cinema, even as a viewer, can shut us off from all the other connections we can make in life. There’s a genuine feeling of deep and thorough catharsis in I Like Movies that is immensely affecting.
There’s nothing wrong with liking or even loving movies; it’s just that a human cannot live on celluloid alone.
