waydowntown

April 6, 2023 7:37 PM

One of those weird cinema encounters that was possible back 20 or so years ago. Some random movie channel, back when those existed and were exciting. My encounter was waydowntown [Wikipedia], a movie set in Calgary where four office workers have a bet about who can live within the network of buildings and skywalks the longest without going outside. Echoes of Office Space, but much more dark and existentialI didn't know if I'd ever find it again, but I did. Here is waydowntown, from 2000. [1h23m, CW shades of suicide, self-harm, existential dread] It's not to everyone's taste, but it left an impression on me.
posted by hippybear (23 comments total)

Whoa, what memories. I was a film student when I saw this back in 2000. I don’t think I ever owned a DVD of it, but I do have somewhere an MPG file I made after recording the movie off the Independent Film Channel.

Later on in 2004, I booked his next movie, “A Problem With Fear”, at a film festival I was working for.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:43 PM on April 6, 2023

Saw this at the Camera Cinema Club in San Jose back in 2000 (a fun monthly club where you didn't know what the movie would be until it started and they'd always have an actor or director in attendance). I got to chat a bit with Don McKellar who I had been a huge fan of for a long time and never imagined I'd speak to him in person! Possibly I was wearing a Hard Core Logo shirt at the time which he commented on! Squee memories.
posted by stevil at 8:45 PM on April 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Funny, it's been awhile since I saw this one. I think I probably saw at the Toronto Film Festival? Definitely in 2000. I liked his 2006 film Radiant City which has some similar energy as waydowntown. Kitchen Party has its moments as well. Shame he hasn't done much since.
posted by Ashwagandha at 10:11 PM on April 6, 2023

I discovered waydowntown the same summer I discovered pot and boy did the two leave a combined impression. In a lot of ways it reminds me of Clerks or Mallrats for a very specific demographic of Canadians.

Also, Calgary still pretty much looks like that.
posted by ZaphodB at 10:14 PM on April 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

I never saw this film but I used to visit Calgary annually for family reasons. I’d sometimes spend an afternoon visiting the downtown Habitrail. It’s definitely a great setting for an eerie movie.
posted by sjswitzer at 10:44 PM on April 6, 2023

Downloading as I type this.

Thx for the referral -- most everything important in my life has come out of nowhere, as this movie did for you, hippybear. I won't be able to watch it tonight, over the weekend though.
posted by dancestoblue at 10:48 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've been meaning to watch this movie for over 20 years. I guess it's time! Thanks, hippybear!
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:46 AM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

We watched this at TIFF in 2000 as well, really enjoyed it, and still have it on DVD. Might be a good time to revisit it!
posted by Stacey at 4:26 AM on April 7, 2023

Watched it ages ago, then lived in Calgary for three years. Spent a lonely winter living downtown.

The Plus Fifteen is bigger now. If the purpose of a system is what it does, the purpose of the +15 is to provide a privatized system of climate-controlled sidewalks from which it is legal to exclude racialized and unhoused people.
posted by sixswitch at 7:12 AM on April 7, 2023

years ago I was working on a project that briefly had me hanging out with some of the key people behind Waydowntown, which I'd recently seen at a local film festival. They were VERY unhappy with it. Not because they felt it sucked but because one particularly flawed performance had more or less killed its momentum at a key point later in the movie. It was one of those classic low budget moviemaking dilemmas. They couldn't afford to recast and reshoot the relevant scenes, so they mostly just cut a bunch of stuff out, did some workarounds that aren't particularly noticeable ... except something happens dramatically (or more to the point doesn't) at a key point that caused the whole movie to stumble.

And of course you can't even point at that particular performance now because it's mostly not there. It's an absence where the should be some serious substance.
posted by philip-random at 8:33 AM on April 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Loved, loved, loved this film when I saw it (IDK, 2001-2ish). I had a friend at the time that watched it with the group of us, whose name was Bradley, and for the next three months his name was 'Sadly, I'm Bradley' until he got pissed about it and we stopped. Every now and then, when I enter the vestibule of a large building, I'll wonder about the vacuum-sealed screaming chamber in this film.

And of course, I can't share these memories and connections with anybody else because nobody saw the film.
posted by eclectist at 9:40 AM on April 7, 2023

I have an incomplete mental picture of this movie, but upon seeing this post I immediately thought, "that's got Don McKellar, right?" I don't know if I saw the whole thing, caught part of it on some movie channel, or only knew about it through its connection to the other weird Canadiana of the era that I definitely saw, including Twitch City or Last Night.
posted by fedward at 10:27 AM on April 7, 2023

Wow, yeah. I saw this movie in university around the time of its release - I was watching lots of movies with my friends (it's basically all we did) and spent a lot of time watching pretty much anything at our local indie theatre. It might be because I was paying more attention then, but it definitely felt like the mid-to-late 90s were a golden era for weird Canadian cinema (I still rewatch Hard Core Logo from time to time).
posted by lumberbaron at 12:21 PM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Definitely a golden age for weird Canadian cinema. Who here remembers watching stuff like Kissed (starring Molly Pakrer as a necrophilic undertaker) or Exotica (Don McKellar + birds) or Leolo (impossible to summarize) in their university/CEGEP film classes?
posted by jordantwodelta at 1:17 PM on April 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

I still occasionally try to get people to watch Kissed. I am rarely successful.
posted by Stacey at 1:24 PM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

waydowntown was the only movie IFC or Sundance (or somewhere channel) seemed to own when my parents first got directv and I had to spend the summer after graduating from undergrad in my childhood bedroom recovering from back surgery. It was waydowntown and but I'm a cheerleader. Two of the few (repeat after repeat after repeat) brightspots in a pretty bleak summer.
posted by atomicstone at 5:06 PM on April 7, 2023

Lead waydowntown actor Fab Fillipo is now the co-creator of a fabulous series called Sort Of, starring its other co-creator Bilal Baig as a trans-non-binary nanny who gives up a lifelong dream to support their employers through a tragedy. It’s intimate and funny and poignant and just so so great, highly recommend.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 6:27 PM on April 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

I still occasionally try to get people to watch Kissed.

Not to be mistaken for the alternate pasttime: I still occasionally try to watch people get kissed.
posted by hippybear at 7:04 PM on April 7, 2023

This reminds me of tuning in with no context to what seemed to be a quirky roommate comedy, which went reeeeally dark over the course of its hour and a half. Somewhat traumatized by my subverted expectations, I later learned it was called Shallow Grave. Probably would have been a Very Different voting experience of I'd known even the title going in.
posted by kaibutsu at 7:19 PM on April 7, 2023

I finished an urban studies degree in 2015 and I was thinking I'd watched this film in one of my Urban geography/Urban studies courses. That would have been appropriate considering the commentary on my city's downtown and Plus15 (skywalk) network. However, on reflection I took a Canadian film studies course* in a one week block as my last course to complete my degree and I think we watched WayDowntown then. It was a surreal week of watching 1 or 2 (very weird) Canadian films a day. The only other one I can remember watching was My Winnipeg, but for the life of me I can't remember any more.

* (Film and the City: The Urban Imaginary in Postmodern Canadian Cinema)
We did, however, watch Run, Lola, Run in one of my Urban studies classes related to Hägerstrand's time geography- which was a great connection
posted by My Kryptonite is Worry at 9:58 PM on April 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

OK, I'm only halfway through but: Is Douglas Coupland involved here, or is everyone in Canada Douglas Coupland?
posted by pompomtom at 2:28 AM on April 8, 2023

I still occasionally try to get people to watch Kissed. I am rarely successful.

I saw it at TIFF in a 9:00 AM slot at the Varsity after I had been up all night.

This is the best way to see it.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:17 AM on April 8, 2023

I still occasionally try to get people to watch Kissed.

I worked with someone who looked an awful lot like Peter Outerbridge (circa 1996) and he was teased mercilessly about this when the movie came out. I usually describe Kissed as a non-gross necrophilia film.

But yeah the mid-90s was a golden age of Canadian indies - Double Happiness, The Five Senses, Eclipse, Crash, Cube, Sweet Hereafter, When Night Is Falling, I Love a Man in Uniform, Love & Human Remains... So many more.
posted by Ashwagandha at 8:15 AM on April 8, 2023 [4 favorites]