Long-time FX man J.M. Logan makes his directorial debut with the sometimes-handsome but more-often tedious Family, which is not, as the title might lead one to assume, a gay flick or another telling of Charlie Manson's summer of love. Instead, find in it a retread of Freeway by way of The Hitcher by way of Kalifornia by way of Breakdown and Children of the Corn IV and every other mother-loving noir/Americana/road-trip flick you can name. Mistaking cheap Final Cut Pro editing somersaults for character-development and scares, the picture finally washes out as a poorly-written, poorly- paced and performed "psychological thriller." The bad guy delivers endless spit-soaked monologues, the anti-heroine spends most of her time emoting dully against her dull co-stars, and an early scene where someone has to ad-lib a conversation into a pay phone actually makes one long for the relative buff of Bob Newhart's antiquated telephone shtick. It's the lack of professionalism that rankles, really--that undeniable feeling that you're wasting your time here on someone's pet project, and that the most Family will ever claim is that it was directed by the self-described "visual effects producer" for The Passion of the Christ.

None of Logan's mastery within his field is on display here, though. A decidedly more mundane story of escaped-con Jean (Renée Humphrey) hitching a ride with ex-cop Eldon (Boyd Kestner, not bad with little to work with) and his young son Cole (Tanner Richie), Family is your standard cross-country journey of self-discovery. Secrets? Sure. Surprises? Almost none. But there is an interminable amount of deadening dialogue shot back and forth across the front seat of a car as classical music blares in almost complete misunderstanding of how score is used in a motion picture. Character development is necessarily minimal, given that skeletons in closets are used exclusively as the plot points in what passes for plot in Family, but nothing (such as tension, for instance, or compelling set-pieces, or an interesting premise) rushes in to fill the void. What's left is a foregone conclusion rambled towards with a surfeit of energy and an excess of blah. More's the pity, as a few moments (including a tense visit to a roadside grocery and a shower gone wrong) hold the potential for shock--or, at least, for exploitation. But alas. Family's as stingy with the cheap thrills as it is with the sophisticated ones; no amount of stutter-cuts and bursts of exposition replayed like a skipped record can substitute for actual involvement in the tale.

Lacking much of anything else to talk about, champions and critics of Family alike inevitably fall back on a discussion of its use of a 24p digital camera (with a sepia filter firmly in place throughout) and of how it looks relative to other HiDef productions. What I'll say is that Michael Mann is probably the only person right now who understands how to properly use this technology as a celluloid substitute--and what he understands best is that digital photography is cold, not warm. I should add that Family is very much a film about process: about a freshman screenwriter trotting out his page-bound kinder a good half-dozen rewrites shy of presentable; and about a freshman director able to afford expensive toys, offering a film that is mostly just a demonstration of how high-end equipment allows you to achieve a David Fincher aesthetic without the accompanying cargo of dread and subtext. It's a commercial for technique--desktop editing suites and mounting pictures on a comparative shoestring that have the very shellac cast of thrillers of some substance. All Family really manages, then, is to underscore the impenetrable truism that, with time and resources, you can carve a duck out of clay, but it takes something ineffable to make it quack.-Walter Chaw

I suppose the only things really missing from Independent America are a charismatic mainline into the action and a less meandering focus. These are perhaps natural pitfalls of a cross-country hunt for recalcitrant local businesses, for one can only deal with the vagaries of their survival on a case-by-case basis--and the cases are disquieting enough to forgive a little structural wonkiness. Moreover, the film is far from a doomsaying trudge: often the filmmakers encounter pockets of resistance that suggest that big-box stores and standardized coffee shops can indeed be repelled with a bit of community digging-in. Whether such digging-in will happen is, of course, another matter entirely.

The concept, devised by the husband-and-wife team of director Hanson Hosein and co-producer/narrator Heather Hughes, inches towards Morgan Spurlock territory: the two plot a trans-American trip in which they will stay off interstate highways and exclusively patronize independent businesses. This proves tricky: everywhere they go, corporate stores are encroaching, and story after story involves the legal and financial battles waged in order to fight them. When communities agitate to delimit the presence of chain stores, their governments are hit with lawsuits they can't afford--and in the case of one ridiculous fight against Wal-Mart, the aggressors wage PR battles that liken their opponents to Nazis. The companies put up their hands as if to say "Who, me?" when it's obvious they're destroying local economies and pocketing the difference, which they don't have the decency to redistribute into the workforce.

That said, for every tale of well-capitalized menace, there's a strange victory to relate. Though some successes are marginal, others, such as the conversion of beleaguered Route 66 into an international tourist destination, are rooted in resilience and community, plus the odd local government that's willing to put up a fight. And even when a ghost-town main street is encountered (a frequent occurrence), there's order to the chaos: we're constantly being shown the methods by which large corporations divide and conquer; however daunting, these prove that the Wal-Mart-ization of America is a process rather than an insurmountable monolith. These revelations illustrate exactly where we should fight back as opposed to devolving into that hobgoblin of the progressives: left-wing melancholy.

A pity the argument couldn't have had a little more force. Hosein and Hughes are veterans of TV news, meaning they're subdued and quiet when they ought to be stirring the pot. As irritating as Spurlock was in Super Size Me, one has to admit that he brought his subject to life and gave it a sense of urgency; the indefatigable pair behind Independent America don't ramp up the righteous indignation enough, a matter compounded by the choice to deal with issues as they arise on the road instead of shaping them into a cohesive argument. But these are niggling details. I still felt a good deal of hope and outrage as they drifted towards the unsettling conclusion that community is getting siphoned off by the strip-mall nation--and that it's up to us to stem the tide.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover

It would be very easy to write off Sidekick as another CanCon mediocrity, as an interesting concept and some enthusiastic elbow grease sadly lacking the conceptual force to bring its ideas to life. But the basic template is so common to Canadian films that it bears analysis--and maybe reproach. Sidekick offers Canada's traditional cringing at power while refusing to accept its mantle, and in so doing elucidates the Great White North's default position of Power Bad. Not power in the hands of the unworthy, but power in general, meaning that anyone who tries to establish a personal set of ground rules is in danger of being tagged a bully or worse. The thought that power can be used for good--or, for that matter, can be evenly distributed with checks and balances--never crosses anyone's mind: we'd rather accept the burden of victimhood than risk making a disastrous mistake.

The "disastrous mistake" of Sidekick is that of nebbishy tech-boy Norman Neale (Perry Mucci), who notices that office jerk Victor Ventura (David Ingram) is mildly telekinetic and thinks he can mold him into a superhero. We know that Norman is deluded because a) he's obsessed with comic books and b) has no life of his own--a sharp contrast to the misogynistic prick Victor, who is of the world and his own selfish interests. The disaster? As Victor becomes more confident and strong in his superpowers, he has no interest in doing good--he'd prefer to take what he can and kill anyone standing in his way. Norman's power-trip-by-proxy backfires spectacularly by turning a sociopath into a living god: suddenly, he has no means of stopping the heartless monster he's unleashed on the world.

It's quite obvious that this is archetypal Canadiana, as Norman's living through Victor is like Canada's cultural dependence on America, while the undesirability of that American cultural model is taken as a given. But what's important is that rejection of America doesn't mean increased power for Canada: America is so completely identified with power that Canada--typically the inverse of its Southern sister--can't even think about having it for itself. It opposes by offering no opposition, protects its identity by leaving it vulnerable, and fights back by surrendering immediately. It doesn't take a genius to tell you that this sort of passive resistance is tactical suicide--just as it doesn't take a genius to tell you that when applied to a narrative, it becomes instant, tortuous frustration.

Writer Michael Sparaga and director Blake Van de Graaf seem like nice guys, though, and their genial nature comes forth in the movie. The filmmakers don't exactly pull their punches in depicting the double-bind, portraying the business elite as a group of unconscionable pricks, and they find a great performer in Mackenzie Lush, who assumes the role of beleaguered secretary (and object of desire) Andrea. But their conviviality masks a larger failure, i.e. the inability to fight back against injustice. In the Canadian way, they've pretty much accepted their lot and refused to ask for more, resulting in a movie in which the assumption of power also means the assumption of evil. If Canada wants a narrative film culture that's worth a damn, it's going to have to take up arms against its identified oppressors and build a future for itself. To do anything else is to accept the status quo it pretends to critique to the point of self-negation.-Travis Mackenzie Hoover