THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS
Friday, September 14 – 3:15 PM
Director: Bruce McDonald
After Canadian ingénue Ellen Page's ball-chopping performance in Hard Candy, perhaps it's best to take her in small hits, crack style. In Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments, Page is Tracey, an occasionally shower-curtain-clad 15 year old with the requisite high school problems, including evolving sexuality, a misplaced, dog-imitating brother, parental interference, and a shaky camera. Like McDonald's magnum opus, Hard Core Logo, there will be punk and Joe Dicks. Or, perhaps not. -S.T.



IMPORT/EXPORT
Friday, September 14 – 3:30 PM
Director: Ulrich Seidl
The title of this film is misleading. Not once is there a single mention of Art Vandelay. There is some importing and exporting, although not of chips or diapers. Instead, the importing involves a nurse coming from the Ukraine to Vienna to start a new and better life. Meanwhile, a security guard from Vienna ‘exports’ to Ukraine for the very same reason. If you are familiar with Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s unflinching realism, you’ll know that neither character is likely to find a better life. Instead they find all sorts of obstacles and problems, many of which are nearly unbearable, even for the viewer. -R.T.



THE STONE ANGEL
Friday, September 14 – 4:45 PM
Director: Kari Skogland
I read The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence a few years ago and I’m quite intrigued to see how it will be handled as a film. The novel is told from the perspective of Hagar Shipley, a senior citizen who stubbornly resists moving out of her son’s house and into a nursing home. Simultaneously, through flashbacks a parallel narrative tells her life story. The film employs the same devices, altering them such as to make it more suitable as a motion picture. Ellen Burstyn stars as the struggling Hagar, a role that she is more than capable of playing to its full potential. If you’ve seen Requiem For a Dream, you’ll probably agree. That movie scared me straight. -R.T.



WEIRDSVILLE
Friday, September 14 – 9:30 PM
Director: Allan Moyle
This title isn’t misleading. Weirdsville is an oddball comedy about drugs, and about 10 minutes into the film you’ll feel as if you’ve entered upon your own crazy trip. The action revolves around Royce and Dexter, two stoner/ slackers in pure nineties fashion. When Royce’s girlfriend Matilda overdoses and dies, the two decide to bury her in an abandoned drive-in, but accidentally discover Satanists performing a ritual sacrifice right where they were going to bury her. If this doesn’t sound strange enough to you, watch out for a fight scene involving midgets clothed in medieval garb. BYOD. -R.T.