{"id":6472,"date":"2011-08-28T21:41:38","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T01:41:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=6472"},"modified":"2015-10-02T14:23:17","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T19:23:17","slug":"roadkill-1989-bruce-mcdonald","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/6472","title":{"rendered":"Roadkill (1989, Bruce McDonald)"},"content":{"rendered":"

“If you wanna drive, you’ve gotta kill.”<\/p>\n

Opens with a mini-documentary about rabbit breeding, and I’m thinking someone had been watching L’age d’Or<\/a><\/em> lately.<\/p>\n

Bruce with his lead actress:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Record label flunky Ramona (Valerie Buhagiar, later in Highway 61<\/em>) is assigned the task of tracking down a touring band gone missing, Children of Paradise. She takes a taxi for this purpose, drives 18 hours straight. Main label guy Roy, with slicked-back hair and a vaguely familiar look (he had small parts in eXistenZ<\/a><\/em> and A History of Violence<\/em>) stays back, yelling at her over the phone when she calls in.<\/p>\n

Roy:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

She finds the band briefly, but the singer has disappeared. So she pools her efforts with a documentary crew (the director of which is played by Bruce McDonald himself) also hired to document the Children of Paradise. At some point she has sex with a 15-year-old guy at the drive-in, who gives her his car. Ramona finally finds the band’s singer, now a spaced-out mute bald hot-dog salesman. But he wanders off, leaving her with a self-proclaimed serial killer, played by Don McKellar, the movie’s writer. All the players (including Roy) meet up at a bar for the finale, supposed to be the Children of Paradise’s final show, and it is, since Don shoots a whole bunch of people (including the documentary crew – only movie I’ve seen in which the writer gets to kill the director).<\/p>\n

Mute vocalist:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

Postscript: the taxi’s meter rolls over and Ramona only owes a couple bucks. Also the cabby meets Joey Ramone for some reason.<\/p>\n

Fun indie movie, creatively and energetically shot, with wall-to-wall music. I’d be glad to see more indie films take their cues from punk rock instead of from Little Miss Sunshine<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Joshua at Octopus Cinema:<\/p>\n

Aesthetically, the film contains many more iconic moments than one would think, from the silhouetted conversation [Don McKellar] has with Ramona to the solitary dance Ramona shares with Luke in the center of a grouping of cars, McDonald peppers the film with moments of intermittent beauty, striking images that remain on the brain for hours afterward.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“If you wanna drive, you’ve gotta kill.” Opens with a mini-documentary about rabbit breeding, and I’m thinking someone had been watching L’age d’Or lately. Bruce with his lead actress: Record label flunky Ramona (Valerie Buhagiar, later in Highway 61) is assigned the task of tracking down a touring band gone missing, Children of Paradise. She […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,958,391,1148,1319],"class_list":["post-6472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-bruce-mcdonald","tag-canada","tag-indie-rock","tag-serial-killer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6472"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10302,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6472\/revisions\/10302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}