01. Gordon Pinsent has a fantastic voice for narration, which is good because he often got to read aloud to Julie Christie. Quick, someone hire him for a book on tape.
02. Julie Christie looks really, really good for her age. Also, for a woman who says she doesn’t like to act and chooses her film roles very carefully, in the last three years she’s been in five films (four of which I’ve seen). She’s becoming weirdly ubiquitous.
03. This movie is basically The Notebook minus the excessive, excessive cheesy schmaltz and minus the story mostly being told through younger versions of the aged characters. This isn’t a pretty movie about love and erasure, it’s sort of depressingly brutal and tragic. I haven’t cried this much at a movie in a long, long time. Or ever, actually, now that I think about it.
06. They played k.d. lang’s version of “Helpless” over the closing credits and that in and of itself was enough was to make us cry again.
07. I spent half the movie trying to figure out where I recognized the awful, awful supervisor of the long-term care facility from and after IMDBing her, I found out she played the First Lady in Air Force One. Hah.
08. Canada rarely gets to be Canada on film. I know that every time I see a movie that’s been filmed in Canada, I usually whine about how no one in their right mind would ever confuse New York City with Toronto and that try as you might, you just can’t disguise that you’ve shot your film in Canada. Except those films never feel like Canada, mostly because they’re not supposed to, obviously. But this does. Very, very southern western Ontario. Clearly there were set decorators and the like — I saw their names in the credits — but nothing about the locations feels dressed. They’ve clearly assembled furniture and knick knacks and what not for the different characters’ houses, but every single one of those homes are houses you’ve been in at one point or another. Even the really schleppy furniture or wall hangings you see; you see stuff like this all the time in movies and it’s meant to convey a certain type of information about the people who live there and the place where they live, but I’ve never had a film about Canada (not even Canadian films) achieve that the way this one did.
09. One of the greatest minor characters was this guy who used to do the colour commentary for the Winnipeg Jets and although he was really, really far gone with his own dementia, he’d still provide commentary on everything that was going on. It was absolutely hysterical while being simultaneously incredibly heart breaking.
10. I’d say if you’re looking for a film about geriatrics, life, and loss, see this one instead of Venus.