I Like Movies (2022)
Obscure and minor as it is, no film this year pushed more nostalgia buttons for us than this one.
It brought us back to our years and years toiling in the home video business.....(mostly purchasing VHS tapes and DVDs for the inventories of all varieties of video stores.....from neighborhood Mom 'n Pops to national chains.
More to the point, it brought us back to recalling young men like this film's lead character Lawrence Kweller (expertly brought to life by Isaiah Lehtinen.) We encountered many Lawrences over the years in the video trenches.....some of them fun to to engage with, others that drove us crazy and at least one we had to fire......
Lawrence, a Canadian high school senior, is the quintessential movie nerd. A passionate, obsessed cinephile and filmmaker since childhood, cinema is his life, his religion, his very raison d'etre. Single minded and self absorbed, he'll accept nothing less for his future than acceptance to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, training ground for many famous gifted filmmakers he worships.
He's also, to most people around him, a colossal boorish pain in the ass. Most cruelly, he patronizes and denigrates Matt (Percy Hynes White), his one and only friend and filmmaking partner......referring to Matt as his 'placeholder' friend until he ascends to the glories of NYU.
Ultimately, Lawrence's preening egotism and uncompromising belligerence undoes him in multiple ways, including the loss of his directing the senior class documentary and his nervous breakdown while clerking at the neighborhood video store. But it's a tribute to actor Lehtinen's fearless, unflinching portrayal of Lawrence that he allows us to view the character fully, the flaws and fears behind the posturing........ a very human, dare we say sympathetic boy struggling to break out of the self-made bubble he's confined himself in.
And speaking of that, let's not forget to mention Romina D'Ugo in the pivotal role of Alana, Lawrence's manager-boss at the video store - a young woman who's survived her own dashed dreams and provides Lawrence with some much needed maturity and wisdom.
Not a world beater of a film by any means, but "I Like Movies" functions well as kind of modest but incisive x-ray of a unique individual, a province well suited to independent cinema.
And in complete honesty, we'd be lying to you all if we denied seeing a little bit of Lawrence in ourselves, having spent our own childhood and adulthood as a cinephile who can't go a day without a movie.......
3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2).
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