I just watched this for the first time on my cable companies free On-Demand. I would say, interesting...complicated...disjointed...but demanding a 2nd view. Jennifer Jason Leigh is somewhat under-stated in this, and the boy is believable at times, totally not at other times. Questions come up at the end of almost every scene, so that's why I probably will view this again. But, can't help feeling I'm watching a "E-True Hollywood Story" about "Family Ties" or "Growing Pains" (what with Alan Thicke in this) at times it feels like an entertainment documentary, with some added drama that I won't "spoil". The fact that this was filmed in Canada is kind of parody of itself in that they make fun of that fact, but yet are also filming in Canada. Ironic.
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pwalkerfm15 September 2006
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SnoopyStyle19 April 2020Famous 12 year old TV star Taylor Brandon Burns arrives in Toronto with his manager mom Suzanne Burnbaum (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to do a big budget bombastic movie. Rick Shiller (Don McKellar) is the struggling indie filmmaker turned reluctant driver. Taylor is under tremendous pressure struggling to grow up in a grown up world. Suzanne is useless and having a fling with Rick. When Taylor goes missing with struggling actress Natalie, Rick has to go find him.
This actually got interesting. The most interesting is Taylor running away with Natalie. The movie needs to be about that. The other parts should be trimmed back. McKellar should really get out of the way of his own movie. It should not be his movie. It should be about the kid. It's risky to bet the whole project on a child actor but this kid has the skills to pull it off.
The moviemaking within the movie has one great section with Taylor in the fake cockpit. The fake CGI is a big mistake. The movie does not need it and it looks really fake. The only way to save that is to make sure that the audience knows the footage is rudimentary test footage. The main problem with that is the audience is unlikely to be smart enough to get it. All in all, I really like the kid's performance and his struggles. -
tantilion7 May 2006This movie is pretty funny. It's absurd in many ways, but also very funny. It dosn't do anything that new, but the jokes are all good and the characters make me chuckle (aside from when I want to slap them).
The plot of the movie they are making within the film should be noted, that is, the (fictional) president getting captured by terrorists and his little rascal son taking over and rescuing his dad made me roll on the floor laughing. At least until I realized that someone probably was going to actually make a movie like that, which is BAD.
The characters are all funny, though as I said before, I often wanted to slap them. The bratty child-star is annoying, and the apparent sympathy towards them gets annoying.
Also, the characters act ridiculously. Why would the actress-model actually want a long term relationship with that little idiot....I mean the kid was 12 for crying out loud! This bugged me a lot. Oh, and the artsy director-legal guardian actually putting up with the child-star and his mom. -
federovsky25 January 2005I just couldn't get into this. Don McKellar, who I've never heard of before, just looked like he was doing an impersonation of Peter Sellers. His deadpan approach was a leaden hand over the whole film. Every line he delivered fell flat on the ground, as in a vacuum. There was something eerily compelling about him though, I couldn't take my eyes off him - or maybe it was just that cardigan he wore under his jacket the whole time.
The storyline might have not invited criticism were it not for the fact that we were subjected to two excruciating moral lessons at the end (on parentalism and on the childstar issue). Mmm, thanks, I so need to be preached at - NOT.
Unfortunately, Taylor Brandon Burns wasdislikable even when he wasn't supposed to be, and his blonde girlfriend character was just a cardboard cut-out. How were we supposed to care?
Well, we were all probably there looking for laughs, not philosophy. Problem is the laughs just weren't there. It was all vaguely depressing. -
We get a whiff of the "child star" of the title on the flight that is bringing Taylor Brandon Burns to Toronto to play one of the starring roles in a movie project. Not only is he rude to the flight attendant, his own mother, a cheap wheeler dealer, capitalizes on the fact that it's the attendant's word against her son and demands compensation in the way of extra mileage points and upgrades. These two are a rotten pair!
Don McKellar, the talented writer-director, pokes fun at the Hollywood movie industry and the arrogance and lack of professionalism when they go to different parts of the world to appear in front of the cameras, something most Canadians involved in the process of making movies have probably witnessed a lot.
We caught with this film not too long ago on a cable channel. It was a lot of fun because Mr. McKellar, who also appear in the film, takes the viewer behind the scenes to show what really go on. Mark Rendall, who plays Taylor, bears a similarity with Macauley Culkin, is one of the best assets in the picture. A subdued Jennifer Jason Leigh, with her usual style is also effective as Suzanne, the manipulative mother of the child star.
Don McKellar also appears as the driver assigned to take Taylor around. Dave Foley seems to be having a good time playing the producer and Michael Murphy is seen as the actor playing the father to the egotistical Taylor. Kristin Adams has an excellent opportunity as the love interest of the young star. -
thecameraguy995 April 2005I loved McKeller's other film "Last Night". Unfortunately, this lame effort is uninspired. We've seen it all before and better. The film doesn't know what it wants to be - is it a comedy, a morality play about fame and the young, is it about parents living through their children, is it about manipulation? The result is a film that doesn't know what it wants to be and in turn, cannot find an audience. Like so many Canadian films, it's just not audience friendly and there is nothing in this film to get anyone but McKeller fans out to watch it. The film just unraveled (badly) and never went anywhere and then needed a long speech at the end to explain a plot we all stop caring about a long way back. The cinematography was excellent but it was wasted in this effort. McKeller can do better and has. Hopefully he can put this failure behind him.
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movieman_kev3 April 2006I had no clue what to expect out of this film. I just heard good things about the director's previous "Last Night", so that being unavailable to me at the moment I decided to catch this one instead as it was readily available for free on Sundance on Demand. Thankfully so, as I would've definitely not have paid for this heavily clichéd, trite and towards the end overly pretentious 'little film that couldn't'. Boiling down to a lame road movie, this film about a spoiled prepubescent actor who runs of while filming a movie in Canada. suffers from sub-par writing as well as hack-eyed performances, most notably from Don McKeller himself (coming off as an eighth-rate Peter Sellers). In summation, Don't bother with this film as it will be wasted time on your part.
My Grade: D- -
parsons_4013 September 2004I saw this movie Sunday morning (and i am not a morning person) at the Toronto film festival, and I must say, it was not what I expected. First of all, it was funnier than the premise would lead you to believe. Secondly, it was actually artfully done. And thirdly, it was very different from the average slow Canadian film. Did I like the film? Yes, very much. It was more of Don McKellar's strange brand of humor, like the kind he used on Twitch City (his TV show) but faster, and maybe a little more biting. In fact, the movie was so fast and multi-layered that I'd like to see it again, soon. Overall I think this was a really entertaining film, and I would highly recommend it -- especially to those who want proof that Canadian movies can be funny, and fast, and exciting, and still smart.
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I was amused reading the comments from the last poster on this film describing Don McKellar's performance a third-rate Peter Sellers -- because that's what it is. Unfortunately, unlike the late great Peter Sellers, all Don McKellar film performances are exactly the same. He will never be nominated for an Oscar for his acting, nor his writing or directing. Though there seems to be a tiny group of rich/powerful individuals in Toronto who seem to think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Except for about 10 people in the rest of Canada, nobody else in this country agrees, judging by box office "votes".
This film seems to come a decade late. Like most Canadian features, it's warped out of time. Maybe it's two or three decades late. Anyways, the "lessons" at the end are heavily laboured and the characters are tiresome and unlikeable. The points it makes with regards to the corporate Hollywood publicity machine have been made many times before, much more effectively elsewhere.
I will give it credit where credit is due: the scenes from the faux film "First Son" are pretty funny. I'll say that. It earns this attempt a couple of points. Hardly enough to redeem this disastrous second effort from Don McKellar the egomaniac "director/actor/writer" however, which falls really flat by any objective measure. -
ilpintl23 February 2005Disappointing follow-up to McKellar's sublime "Last Night" (one of my favorite films of all time) and "Red Violin", this film is about an obnoxious child actor in the mold of Haley Joel Osment, his equally obnoxious stage mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and the hapless indie filmmaker-turned-chauffeur (McKellar) who is assigned to baby-sit them. Minor hilarity ensues from the cross-border (US/Canadian) cultural confrontations and the underage star's affectation of adult nonchalance and knowledge, but not enough to rescue the film, or the viewer. I cannot imagine what possessed the wondrously gifted McKellar to consider such a banal theme. Please regard this as my personal plea to Don McKellar to return to writing and making films of the caliber of "32 Short Films about Glen Gould", "Last Night", and Red Violin".
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rbfetterolf10 July 2006How could anyone even remotely think this was any good? How could anyone call this pretentious art-house anything? I like art-house stuff and this came nowhere close to anything resembling art.
I imagine that only friends of the film makers have commented here. The comments that compare the director/star to Wooody Allen are absurd and laughable. The only funny aspect to this DVD was watching the Making of Child Star and seeing people praise this guy. It looked like Alan Thicke was doing what someone else told/paid him to say when he commented on how Don reminded him of Woody Allen.
I thought the whole thing was supposed to be a farce, but then it appeared like the film was really earnestly serious about preaching how child stars have such a tough life. I am not kidding . . . this movie became didactic about this point.
One of the finer points of the movie was when an adult model has sex with the twelve-year-old star and nobody calls the police. The statutory rapist is portrayed as a hero in a non-ironic way and becomes the open girlfriend of the child star.
I don't usually care too much about plot, but this plot was disjointed (not that this is always a bad thing, but here it is) and retarded. -
madunclehugh28 September 2014***CONTAINS Spoilers*** This film was very disappointing; it started of with a bratty 12-year old boy and his brattiness is completely explained by all those who surround him. One hopes that he will be redeemed by the end of the film somehow - but this does not happen and neither he nor anyone else comes out with nicely at all. It concerns me that neither his mother or anyone else was worried to see a 12-year old lose his virginity to a "purchased" bimbo and then moving on to alcohol and drugs (well he was smoking what looked to be a joint near the end). It didn't help that the boy star was obviously not 12 but probably more like 15 or 16 and was far more aware of things than a 12-year old should have been. It would have been better if there had been a good resolution at the end with Taylor becoming more personable and NOT still on the downward track to self destruction which he obviously was....
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THis movie was comic genius, and is my favorite Canadian movie ever, Finally someone has made a film that manages to be thoughtful and funny at the same time. All of my friends loved it too, though some of them thought the ending was a bit incomplete. I disagree! It was fun, and touching, and never schlocky or stupid. And Don McKellar is hilarious! In fact, most of the actors were great, including the young boy (I forget his name) who plays the kid. I guess, as a Canadian, the film makes more sense. I hope Don Mckellar keeps making strange films like this and Last Night (his first one) because no one else is doing anything this interesting AND accessible, with the possible exception of Guy Maddin's last movie.
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Bachfeuer16 April 2005How much I enjoyed this film surprised me. (I saw it at the Philadelphia Film Festival the day after I saw "Checking Out" with Peter Falk. Sothat's saying a lot.)
"Childstar" is a droll send-up of fawning over child stars in our culture, and of being a person low on the film industry totem pole. There is a lot of clever, well-produced stuff in this film. My only negative comment is that too much seems to have been directly lifted from an episode of The Nanny, "When You Pish Upon a Star."
I will go to see any film with Jennifer Jason Leigh. Her arc seems to be like that of Geneviève Bujold before her. Leigh seems to have managed to be in a lower proportion of turkeys than Bujold, so far. Her performance this time worked for me.
Likewise the performance of Don McKellar in his own film was just fine. More power to him! -
BernieBear13 September 2005Don Mckellar is a comic genius, as long as dry wit with an accent is your kind of laugh-a-thon. It is mine, so I loved this movie.
Mckellar plays an endearing character who has just divorced the love of his life, for whom he has shot an independent film which has no backing as his on film love letter equates romantic love to ADHD images erratically juxtaposed against the nature. Since he has to put peanut butter on his bread, he begins working as a driver for a film being shot in his hometown. Thus, Mckellar's character meets 12 year old Taylor Bradford Burns, a teenage star whose fame is hanging on his ability to maintain "adorableness as a child" and thus, his film company and agents are pushing him to do another film whether it's worth doing or not (which is certainly debatable) before his "voice changes".
Jennifer Jason Leigh is exquisite as always in her cooler than ever way, as the mother of the child. She's just looking to "take care of Taylor" the best way she knows how - which includes getting him the largest salary possible, living in the poshest house the studio will foot the bill for, and ensuring that he has "a male role model" by turning her responsibilities over to the first available and passably attractive guy she runs into --- who is of course, our newbie driver.
It's a fun movie. Taylor Bradford Burns is played by a young man who is straddling the line between youth and a teenager with more experience than anyone under 18 should have. Worth renting. Enjoy it with popcorn. -
pix_chick18 October 2005(Spoilers are quotes from movie) I loved this movie so much I watched it all over again the minute it ended. What a funny, intelligent film. A biting commentary on the film industry -- one of the (many) best scenes is when Rick deals with studio "heavies" who attempt to threaten him late in the film -- an absolutely hilarious hospital bed performance from writer/director/lead Don McKellar. Jennifer Jason Leigh is phenomenal as a cagey, manipulative childstar mother-- another actress might not have been able to pull off such a loathsome character who somehow captivates and charms us. Great Canada jokes (well more like US jokes really) throughout. Great scene in the beginning as writers pitch the script to the studio - I can't give it away but the scene is hilarious from start to end with lines like "Are they funny terrorists?" and in reply to "It's patriotic as s**t" -- the producer replies "It shoots in Canada".
See this flick!!