Walk Backwards

"Walking Backwards" is a pathetic example of everything that is worst about Canadian movies. It has that high-school VTR look of a shoestring-budget effort filmed for free at public places and private homes. This is usually a giveaway that a movie is Canadian-made - the amateurish videotape look, the soundtrack that sounds like it came from a really, really cheesy Uruguayan porno movie, the Microsoft PowerPoint title credits, and the heavy reliance on potty-mouth dialogue that desperately strives to give the limp offering a degree of "edginess" and "artistic validity."

The most tragic thing of all is that at the Toronto Film Festival, dismal offerings like this, targeted at an audience of maybe two thousand blindly patriotic consumers in Canada only, receive rave reviews. Americans would not watch this kind of trash, and it will never be shown on HBO. It is not that Canadians do not appreciate good filmmaking; only that we are so desperate not to be subsumed by the much larger and much, much better-produced American market, we grasp frantically at any wretched rubbish and trumpet it as artistic and good, as long as it is CANADIAN.

And I am not averse to rough dialogue and sexual content, as long as it is in context, and used in a well-produced vehicle. I like "The Sopranos," "Reservoir Dogs," and many British movies and series (many of them also done on a shoestring). The thing is, these are actually good.

"Walking Backwards" is not. You can't throw bad language and sexual situations into a basically lame plot and expect intelligent people to be blinded to that fact just by distracting them with shock value.

This is not a movie for those with weak stomachs. It is sexually explicit, emotionally strangling, and knows no taboos. You will be thrown into Mikey's world, but not truly be exposed to its depths unless you can allow yourself to watch the movie in its entirety. This is a movie that will stay in your mind, even if you would rather it not.