I Like Movies (2022)
Strong Female Characters Do Exist (If You Know Where to Look)
During the Video Store Revolution of the mid-1990’s, VHS clerks turned their lifelong obsessions into bona fide film careers (think Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith, and even Robert Rodriguez—who, to my knowledge, never worked that job, but whose ambition was to make cheap action movies that might someday appear on rental store shelves in Mexico). These auteurs’ collective cult followings made Hollywood take notice, meaning audiences both indie and mainstream felt the ripple effects long into the next decade.
The movies tended to be low-budget relationship dramas or limited-location crime thrillers. Simplifying their productions gave writers/directors room to dazzle with innovative dialogue, editing, and camerawork—and stories that yanked back the curtain on pockets of society the big studios often considered too “niche” to explore. I was a movie-freak teenager when all this went down, and having a more powerful firehose to drink from meant not settling for typical multiplex fare on a Saturday night: I saw Larry Clark’s Kids at the same theatre in which I’d watched Batman Forever just a couple months earlier.
Though many of the films tapped directly into my youthful, angsty desire for violence, gritty dialogue, and dicey situations, it took nearly three decades to find a movie that captured what it meant to be, well, me in that moment—to have entertainment industry dreams that, for once, seemed accessible to a socially awkward high school kid living on the couch of a one-bedroom apartment shared with a miserable single parent. Chandler Levack’s I Like Movies is that movie, and it’s sensational.
Isaiah Lehtinen plays Lawrence Kweller, a socially awkward Canadian high school kid living on the couch of a one-bedroom apartment, which he shares with his miserable single mom, Terri (Krista Bridges). In his abundant free time, Lawrence and his only friend, Matt (Percy Hynes White) make experimental comedies and have “appointment television” sleepovers every Saturday to watch SNL. At school, Lawrence has been tasked with making the senior class video, a project he loves because it involves making movies—and hates because it’s a movie about people he doesn’t know (and therefore despises from a back-corner-lunch-table’s distance).
This simple (if inwardly turbulent) life is upended by two catastrophic events: the looming prospect of having to pay tuition at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and Matt’s burgeoning interest in a girl named Lauren P. (Eden Cupid). Beleaguered working stiff Terri is, of course, broke, so Lawrence takes a job at a Blockbuster-esque video store called “Sequels”. There, he meets a cadre of adult misfits, including “cool boss” Alana (Romina D’Ugo), on whom he soon develops a crush. Finally in his element (getting paid to be surrounded by movies, talk about them, and rent 10 free each week), Lawrence comes out of his shell; he recommends putting up an “Employee Picks” section to Alana, and eagerly awaits the day when he can use his spiffy new employee discount to buy Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love when it hits DVD.
The first half of I Like Movies plays as if Clerks had centered on the Randal character instead of Dante. Lawrence is obnoxious and toxic toward anyone who disagrees with his tastes or threatens to puncture his protective celluloid bubble. There are running gags aplenty involving a perpetually increasing late fee for a copy of Wild Things; skits in which Lawrence and Matt pantomime their Saturday Night Live “caught on the street” cast member intros; and awkward encounters in Lawrence’s living room/bedroom. But Levack carefully plants the seeds of her film’s serious turn throughout, so that when I Like Movies steers hard into its coming-of-age rough patch, the tonal shift feels natural. Sure there are jokes in the latter part of the film, but they’re punctuations instead of mere punchlines; they hit as tension breakers for some serious gut-wrenching drama.
As Lawrence’s world opens up, he begins to see (as do we) those around him as actual flesh-and-blood people—not merely supporting characters in his Main Character Syndrome delusions. In particular, Lawrence’s mother, Terri, has a couple of great scenes in which she finally asserts herself in her own home, treating Lawrence as the adult he is becoming. These are uncomfortable exchanges, to be sure, especially when we learn why we’ve never seen (and barely heard of) Mr. Kweller. In a similar regard, one night after closing, Alana delivers a stirring monologue in the video store about her life and dreams before becoming a Sequels manager. In both cases, Lawrence has never thought of the women in his life as having lives—or thoughts or regrets or feelings beyond those that correspond to the running screenplay he’s constantly writing for himself.
It is these deftly observed, beautifully acted scenes that cemented my long-held belief that Hollywood’s idea of the “strong female character” is, in fact, a cruel, Mirror Universe inversion of what truly makes women strong. Typically, we’re presented with stoic, ass-kicking, sarcasm factories who put down and out-perform their male counterparts in every way. They have no use for romance, preferring the platonic empowerment of sisterhood to a climactic kiss (or, if they simply must show affection towards a guy, it manifests as that godawful “touching foreheads” nonsense that nobody does*). The exceptions in the mainstream really stand out, and underscore the gross extent to which legions of filmmakers simply don’t “get” (or, worse yet, choose to ignore) the complementary dynamics of opposite-sex relationships.
The women in I Like Movies are vulnerable, but not in a way that implies fragility. They’ve been through horrible situations and come out the other side with just enough strength to soldier on. In Lawrence, Terri and Alana see a young man whose trauma is real, but whose sense of its proportion in his circumstance is completely out of whack. It is through their frustrating interactions with him that they learn just how stuck they’ve been themselves, and how the seemingly endless possibilities at Lawrence’s fingertips are available to them, too—if only they could see past the fake prison walls of that one-bedroom apartment and dreary video store.
It feels like a magic trick, watching Lawrence’s story momentarily become Alana and Terri’s stories—before resuming a film whose very meaning has been altered and enriched in the interim. Just as Lawrence learns from the two central women in his life, they learn and grow from his wrong-track example—while also giving him some pointers on how to relate to people beyond the context of movies, and hold his tongue when encountering a clash of tastes (there’s a zero-hour reference to Steel Magnolias whose Inception-like significance to the story has stuck with me for weeks).
What makes I Like Movies all the more remarkable is that writer/director Chandler Levack is a woman (a fact I was ignorant of until after I’d watched the movie**), and that portions of the story are autobiographical. How could a female Canadian filmmaker tap so uncannily into the embarrassment, isolation, and hopes of a mid-nineties teen boy, without succumbing to judgmentalism or retro-fitted notions of “incel-dom”? If I had to guess, it’s because feelings of awkwardness, yearning, and hopelessness are universal struggles (or at least broader than one might think), and transcend countries, genders, and eras.
It would be nice if, similar to the Video Store Revolution, Hollywood embraced the relational complexities bubbling up from the indie scene (see also Vivian Kerr’s Scrap for a female-centric drama that actually has a use for men). How refreshing would it be to someday enjoy mainstream movies whose “Battle of the Sexes” narratives took place on a level playing field (or even just a more level one), and whose notions of turning “Strong Women” into cartoon clones of cartoonishly macho guys were relegated to the same Game Night trivia category as brick-and-mortar video stores?
To quote Randal from Clerks 2, “That’d be pretty fuckin’ sweet, right?”
*Yes, I’ve just succumbed to the “Fallacy of Absolutes”; in fact, there’s photographic evidence of my own forehead-to-forehead affection. But I question the idea of two people being so swept up in their initial passion for one another that they, on animal instinct, forego kissing, or even hugging, and head right for the rhino love charge.
**I’d assumed, ignorantly, that the name “Chandler” was exclusively masculine, having only ever encountered it on the TV show Friends.
If you liked this review, check out Ian’s I Like Movies conversation with Pat “Uber Critic” McDonald on the Kicking the Seat Podcast!
