Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

zardoz-13 This low-budget crime caper about a quartet of clueless cretins who assemble to rob a bank qualifies as inspired lunacy. Director Gary Yates and scenarist Lee MacDougall have fashioned a funny little flick with good and bad characters. The morality of this piece is such that the robbers are punished for their notorious deeds. However, despite their abject failure to reap the benefits of their ill-gotten gains, the sympathetic ones are redeemed for a largely happy ending. The soundtrack ripples with memorable Top-40 hits, including Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," April Wine's "Say Hello," Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Have You Ever Seen The Rain." Clocking in at a spartan 79 minutes, "High Life" doesn't squander a second and drums up many surprises as well as a refreshing sense of spontaneity. The personalities of these small-time criminals are etched brilliantly, too. Dick (Timothy Olyphant of "Hitman") is a hospital janitor, but he doesn't hang onto this job for long. A former prison cell mate, Bug (Stephen Eric McIntyre of "The Lookout"), visits Dick at work, and Dick gets fired in short order for Bug's shenanigans. Dick's other loser friend Donnie (Joe Anderson) who knows how to steal purses and wallets and withdraw money from the owner's ATM accounts. Dick concocts a scheme where Donnie will pull out $60 and then use other cards to get $54o. Dick recruits a romantic looking French guy Billy (Rossif Sutherland of "Timeline") who will take both the receipt and the cash into the bank and complain to a teller. Dicks hopes that the bank will contact the repair crew, and Bug and he will masquerade as a repairmen and raid the ATMs. Dick's well-laid plans go awry when the pretty teller, Alma (Brittany Scobie of "The Plague"), that Billy sweet-talks, decides not to inform her manager that the ATMs are on the blink. Instead, she takes the cash for herself. Incredulously, our protagonists watch her stroll off to lunch with the $540.No sooner have our heroes witnessed this disaster than an armored truck whips up to the bank. Bug, who is high on cocaine, brandishes an arsenal of firearms. Billy pulls out his gun, too. Dick struggles to convince Bug and Billy from resorting to violence. Bug shoots Billy because these two haven't gotten along well since they met. Bug hijacks the armored truck with Donnie and his relative Lynn (Kelly Wolfman of "Reasonable Doubt") inside and takes it to their other former prison inmate friend, Moondog (Michael Bell of "Goon") who owns a garage. In a frenzy, Bug uses a jackhammer to drill a hole in the top of armored truck and pipe in carbon monoxide. He does this to flush Lynn and Donnie out of the vehicle. Meantime, Dick has helped Billy up off the pavement and put him in a car and they careen off to Moondog's garage. Dick watches as Bug pulls $300-thousand out of the armored truck. While nobody is looking, Lynn slips an exploding paint canister into the bag. Dick and Bug flee the scene to a ranch, but Dick refuses to ride off into the sunset with Bug."High Life" is an impressive comedy of errors. The cast is first-rate, especially Timothy Olyphant and Donald Sutherland's other son Rossif. Stephen Eric McIntyre makes a grim villain with a trigger happy streak in his warped psyche. Yates creates both suspense and comedy and the film never degenerates into a gritty, unsavory saga, as it could easily have done. I'd never heard of it unless I saw it on clearance sale at a Dollar General Discount store.

moderniste Many other reviews have covered the excellence of the stoned/junked-out humour and the overall kind of lackadaisical mood of entropy: everything going to a chaotic, baroque hell.What I really loved in this little movie was the attention to detail. The costumes and hair/makeup for instance are brilliant. Steven Eric McIntyre couldn't look greasier, and his cold gray eyes burn holes out of his pale grizzled face. He struts into his first scene wearing clapped out flares and some seriously flash rattlesnake cowboy boots, reminding me of legendary close-up shots of gunfighters' boots as they stride into the road for a battle. Bug Is Here and things are going to proceed downhill at a steady clip. Later, you see big black and silver rings and a huge silver belt buckle of galloping horses, that fit right in with Bug's self-image of a bad-arse cowboy pining for his horse, Jezebel. It's fitting that he dies in the saddle, no? Pretty boy Billy has the perfect Euro-boy new wave-ish uniform of stripy tight t-shirts and pegged black jeans, along with big 60-ish sideburns and a flop of wedge-cut hair that was the hipster haircut of the early 80s.Then there's some of the best use of soundtrack music I've heard in a while. The director has a similar gift for setting moods with music as does Scorcese and his legendary oeuvre that uses the Rolling Stones in pitch-perfect moments. This being a Canadian movie, it makes perfect sense to string the music of April Wine, along with screen shots of their vinyl albums and cassettes, throughout the movie. This band, along with CCR, 3 Dog Night and the kind of obscure (if you're not a Canadian who was in his 20s during the late 70s) Montreal recording artist, Pagliaro--set a very specific mood: that of balls to the wall lose your head stoner rock. I was a total new wave/mod/ska/punk snob in my early 1980s jr high and high school years, but I still have fond memories of secretly blasting stoner rock out of my headphones or car stereo and leaning back and just time traveling. This kind of epic release is what all of the characters in this film are searching for.Lastly, there are the strange and wondrous uses of visual motifs: specifically, pink and horses. The morphine pills are bright pink as they are crushed in the ice cream scooper, then dissolved into a brilliant pink solution that courses through the veins of Bug, Billy and Dick. Billy eats a pink fluff of cotton candy, and the ice cream Bug pulls out of the freezer as they are cooking pink morphine in Dick's apartment, is pink strawberry ice cream. Junkies crave sugar, and in this movie, it's pink sugar that is their cracked ambrosia. When we first see Bug and Dick cooking up and getting high, there's a junky dream of thick pink slop reminiscent of the "cook" dripping over the edge of a cardboard box. (Incidentally, that box has an image of a big red barn that perfectly syncs with the big red barn that contains the horses that Bug finds at the end of the movie.) Then there's the mother of all pink paint bombs that so hilariously covers Bug and Dick, making Bug look like, in Dick's words, "a f*#king pink Chuck Norris".And then there's the horses. First, we see them on Bug's belt buckle, and then he has a junky vision of a horse standing over him that he calls "Jezebel". (A childhood memory of a long lost pet? A sly reference to the junky slang word for heroin--"horse"?) Bug fancies himself to be a kind of twisted cowboy, and he meets his storied end covered with pink paint on the back of a beloved horse, on his way to South America. I just love that kind of attention to detail--it's what makes me want to watch this film over and over. And since "High Life" is on heavy rotation on Showtime, that's exactly what I've been doing, with the speakers turned up to 11.

Suzanne Licht The only criticism of this movie, is that it left me wanting MORE. It is one of the most darkly hilarious drug user movies I have ever seen, and each character was unique and quirky. The dialog, rhythm and strange twists and turns of the plot were highly entertaining. I would like to see more work in future projects by all these talented actors, who worked so well together. Rossif Sutherland, as Billy, was sensational, and presented a fascinating characterization. Timothy Olyphant was a very believable drug abuser, roughing up his usual extremely handsome appearance, and provided a kind of heroic center. This is edgy, brilliant work!

nofo04 I saw High Life last night at the Toronto International Film Festival. As caper movies go, it was one of the better ones I've seen. The real focus in on the four hapless criminals, who are all interesting, multi- faceted (and often amusing) characters. The script is clever, and the acting is uniformly strong. The film starts with the (now somewhat clichéd) tactic of showing the audience a scene of how everything has fallen apart for the four criminals during the heist, and then taking us back a few days to see how things got to that point. Make no mistake, this is a 'light' film and not a particularly memorable one, but it's a fun and often unpredictable ride that provided plenty of chuckles right until the end. After the screening, Director Yates and the cast fielded some questions. Yates was an amusing guy and made some insightful comments (particularly regarding the fun soundtrack), but I was a bit disappointed at how flippant/glib Timothy Olyphant's responses were. Seemed like a bit of a douche to be honest--like he saw himself as 'above' the project or something.