Picture Claire (2002)

This film is just plain not believable. Ms. Lewis who is one of my favorite actresses does not fit here. Her fake French is so annoying and looking for "Billy" really gets on my nerves. I would like for her at least to speak a better form of broken English to keep the plot moving. The direction is so slow and there are long periods of time with no dialogs like when Juliette is hanging from the balcony and dropping her boots to the ground.For me this is one of those films from Toronto that just does not fill the bill. A colorless City that always tries to pass for some were else. Plus how long was Mickey Rourke in the Film maybe about 10 minutes?

If you like Picture Claire, or even if you don't, I highly recommend you try to view Claire's Hat. Not really an official movie, it's an excuse film by the director, in an attempt to pardon himself for the terrifyingly bad bomb he'd produced. Wickedly funny for anyone inside or out of the film world, it's something everyone should see. Unfortunately, I haven't heard about any plans for a release of Claire's Hat. If there ever is, grab the chance and see this movie. The best flick of 2003, it will not disappoint.

After all the bad press this film received, I was curious to watch it to see if the criticism was justified. It was. I am a Callum Keith Rennie fan and watched it mostly for him, but watching 80 minutes of eye-rolling tripe that made me yell at my TV screen was not worth it for the five minutes of (great) psychopath Rennie. Most of the fancy frame-in-frame-in-frame shots were annoying and did not add anything at all to the story. Claire was ridiculously stupid and there were plot holes in this thing you could drive a truck through. And the plot, such as it was, moved at a snail's pace. I kept wondering when something was finally going to HAPPEN already. Hated this film. A waste of celluloid.

Picture Claire is a good movie, with a good storyline and good acting. But when it didn't go into theatres and Bruce MacDonald himself thought poorly upon it, I had to wonder what was wrong with it. (And I wasn't the only one.) I bought it the first moment I saw it in stores. Basically much of the movie's elements aren't up to Bruce MacDonald's standards. Everything he uses to make a good story- the foreshadowing, the slight hinting toward something, the full circle- wasn't as clear in the movie as it was in others as say Hard Core Logo and Dance Me Outside. Some of the things should have been made clearer, such as the reference to the islands, the misogyny of certain characters and their expectations of Claire. The denument itself seemed to fall apart on him. It ended in quite a mess, but the very ending itself, the closing credits, I liked. So the movie has flaws. Most movies do. And it's not up to MacDonald's standards. Does that mean his fans won't enjoy it. No, his fans will still enjoy it. People who aren't fans will still enjoy it. Though somehow it should have been done better it would still have been worth seeing in theatres.