In April

This is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen... to a point.

This movie about a suicidal man driving around in a car looking for an opportunity to kill himself when the ghost of a young girl appears in his passenger seat starts as an execrably "indie", pretentious, artsy, low-budget enterprise of the sort I usually hate. And for maybe the first very long half hour, that's what you get. I looked at the clock at the 30 minute mark and questioned whether I could do another 90 minutes of it. Lots of film effects, not much else happening.

But, first off, I noticed something strange: this low-budget pretentious crap movie about a guy driving around in a car had a full-on orchestral score more appropriate for "Raiders Of The Lost Ark". So I began to pay attention. And after the dreadfully long first act... it actually got better.

It stayed pretentiously artsy all the way through, for sure, but, weirdly, instead of taking itself way too seriously all the time, it had a sense of humor about it, which is something I've never seen before. There were a lot of little amusing bits. It actually turned out to be pretty engaging for most of its runtime, surprisingly so for a movie about a suicidal man driving the ghost of a girl around in his car. It did, at the very end, become a little predictable and even saccharine, but that was only the very last few minutes.

For most of it, the oddness and levity offset each other well, and I actually liked it quite a bit. Despite the dreadfully offputting first act, had it ended well, I might have thought it was something pretty special. As it is, still, I liked it, when it's so close to so many things that I don't.

Turns out: Made in Canada. Yep. The Canadians got me again. Even when I can't wholeheartedly recommend their movies, there's so often a certain something just a cut above about them.