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This article was published 27/08/2015 (4043 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Boychoir

IF this movie had been titled Choirboy instead of Boychoir, we might have expected something a little more zany, perhaps a raucous affair about a 11-year-old delinquent who corrupts the privileged goody-goodies at his private school.

Those elements are in place in Boychoir but director François Girard (The Red Violin) maintains a tone of respectful awe in the cloistered realm of choral music, appropriate to the sublime singing therein.

Even so, there is the potential for deviltry in the central character, Stet (Garrett Wareing), borne of the anger of having to live with a substance-abusing mom, and no dad in the picture.

When his mom dies, Stet finds himself finally meeting his biological father (Josh Lucas), a respectable Manhattan businessman who has been surreptitiously sending child-support cheques for years in an effort to keep his paternity a secret from his legitimate family.

Stet finds himself transferred to a wealthy East Coast school, where he may find a place of his own. That’s assuming he can get any acceptance from the mostly snooty student body.

On the strength of his voice, Stet gets a teacher (Glee’s Kevin McHale) and a school administrator (Kathy Bates) on his side. Less easily impressed are Carvelle (Dustin Hoffman), the accomplished choirmaster, and his flinty assistant (Eddie Izzard).

Inevitably, Stet’s success hinges on the acceptance of Carvelle, an old-school educator who believes talent goes hand in hand with hard work and discipline.

It bears a resemblance to the 2000 drama Billy Elliot, in which an 11-year-old from northern England had to overcome prejudice to achieve his dream of becoming a dancer.

Of course, that film benefited from some lively dancing. Notwithstanding a few shots of some grand concert venues, this movie wouldn’t suffer from being consumed in “described video” format. (It might actually be a blessing, as Garrett Wareing doesn’t really look as tough as his character is intended to be.) Its soundtrack is its strongest asset.

Ultimately, this is a movie that’s too classy to exploit its slob-vs.-snob premise and too dry to allow a little anarchic joy to the mix.

That said, if you’re going to go with a classy approach, you might as well take advantage of actors like Hoffman, Bates and Izzard, who somehow manage inject more youthful energy in the story than the kids in the foreground. **1/2

 

Good Kill

WAR is a brutal and dehumanizing business.

But what is it when performed by remote-control drone technology?

What does it become when, as the hero of Good Kill asks, combatants have “no skin in the game?”

Attempting to answer that question are this film’s writer-director, Andrew Niccol, and star Ethan Hawke. Almost 20 years ago, they collaborated on the 1997 science-fiction thriller Gattaca.

Hawke plays Maj. Tom Egan, once a real-world pilot with three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Quantum advances in technology mean pilots aren’t necessarily required to actually fly over war zones. Still in the service, Tom operates unmanned drone aircraft out of an air-conditioned trailer on a base outside of Las Vegas. He can blow up a terrorist cell in the afternoon (hopefully with no children of non-combatants in the area, but not always), and drive home to his wife and kids at night like any respectable working stiff: the man in the grey-flannel flight suit.

This kind of remote-control combat means fewer casualties and, in theory, diminished stress. But the style of fighting takes its toll on Egan, who has taken to swigging vodka surreptitiously in the morning before going on duty. His wife (January Jones) complains he has grown distant. And indeed, distance is something he actively seeks when he asks his commanding officer Lt. Col. Johns (Bruce Greenwood) to be returned to flight duty.

“I miss the fear,” Egan explains to Vera (Zoe Kravitz), a fellow officer with whom he conducts an escalating flirtation.

War edges into war crime when Egan’s unit is obliged to take orders from the CIA. Instead of seeking out armed Taliban, suspects are targeted for “patterns of behaviour” that indicate the presence of enemy chieftains. Collateral casualties become far more likely.

Already teetering on the edge of his conscience, Egan seems destined to topple over.

You have to hand it to Niccol for tackling a subject Hollywood would prefer to ignore. Still, one wishes he had fashioned a fiction as distinctive as its subject matter. If the film’s portrayal of domestic dissolution is excessively familiar, the romantic subplot between Egan and Vera is downright heavy with obligatory sexual tension, necessitating that hoariest of clichés, the intergenerational romance. (Kravitz is 26; Hawke is 44.)

Fortunately, there is much to admire, too, especially in the edgy stuff between the lines. As the film draws closer to its conclusion, Niccol inserts more and more unsettling aerial shots, not of Afghanistan but of Las Vegas — a chilling indicator that it may be just a matter of time before drone warfare won’t necessarily be so one-sided. ***

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca