Review: I Like Movies (2023)

If you like movies, you probably know someone like Lawrence Kweller (Isaiah Lehtinen). Hell, you may even be someone like him. Lawrence watches a movie every day and feels like he’ll die if he doesn’t. He dreams he’ll be a big-time director after attending the NYU Tisch School for the Arts and being mentored by Happiness director Todd Solondz. He’s ambitious, but not necessarily talented or diligent; rather he is hyper-focused on movies. He’s self-absorbed and awkward and a complete pain in the ass, but you have to give it to him: the kid surely does like movies.

This sort of specificity about the character of Lawrence and the setting of Burlington, Ontario in 2002 is what makes Chandler Levack’s I Like Movies standout from other coming-of-age dramedies. Because in its narrative broad strokes, it is very similar to most coming-of-age films. If you peel back the layers of snark, the references, the nostalgia, you have a movie that hits all the beats of films about troubled young men learning a thing or two about the world just in time for college. So the film lives or dies with its prickly main character.

Luckily, the character and performance are credible, so much so that you’ll want to slap some sense into Lawrence throughout the film’s light 99-minute runtime. Levack, herself a critic in addition to a filmmaker, is bold enough to make you hate her protagonist throughout wide portions of I Like Movies. She understands that the key to a film like this working is not whether Lawrence is likeable, it’s whether Lawrence is interesting and whether we are invested in his growth as a person.

In I Like Movies, Lawrence is a senior at Aldershot High School in Burlington (a suburb located between Toronto and Hamilton on the shores of Lake Ontario). He lives with his mom (Krista Bridges) and has only one solitary friend, the affable, if somewhat dim, Matt Macarchuck (Percy Hynes White), with whom he makes videos.

In the film’s opening, we watch Lawrence and Matt’s video assignment for class. It’s supposed to be about “bias in the media,” but Lawrence and Matt use it as an excuse to make a goofy parody of the Christmas morning scene in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—”Boy, what day is it?” “Why, it’s Christmas Day!” The video then turns into an ode to their Saturday night hangouts, aptly titled “Rejects Night,” during which they watch SNL and goof around. The video is shot in full frame mini-DV from the early 2000s, the standard definition haziness and early digital quality of the video providing a nostalgic style for the sequence. The film itself borrows some of these qualities for its own form.

For instance, I Like Movies is full frame, and although shot in high definition, it shares some of the framing that you’ll find in amateur videos of the early 2000s. This includes a propensity to shoot scenes straight on from a perpendicular angle, almost treating the frame as the proscenium arch of a stage. It also uses an abundance of medium and wide angles. Close-ups are reserved for key emotional moments. Levack wants to blend the film’s setting and style, which makes it stand out from typical coming-of-age Sundance-style fare.

Because the story is very Sundance-style. Needing to save up $80,000 for NYU, Lawrence gets a job at Sequels, the local video store. There, he becomes infatuated with his cool manager, Alana (Romina D’Ugo), who worked in the movies and now is the kind of world-wise, upbeat, sympathetic mentor that Lawrence needs at this stage in his life. Or so it seems. The problem is that Lawrence is a narcissist, so in his quest to manifest his destiny, he tears down everyone else in his orbit. This includes his mother, whom he treats like a servant. At one point, he says she likes to pick him up at 2am because it makes her feel like she’s useful. It also includes Matt, whom he devastatingly labels a “placeholder friend” in one of the film’s most affecting moments. 

The only person that Lawrence doesn’t tear down is Alana, but that’s precisely because he fails to see her as much of a person. She’s his crush, his mentor, and his real life object lesson on what happens if you fail in the movies, all rolled into one. When Alana confronts how Lawrence treats her head on, trying to force him to understand that she’s a human being, he reacts like a child. The driving conflict of I Like Movies is whether he can ever grow up to be a responsible adult.

Not that there’s much doubt about the character’s growth. Lessons are learned, characters are overwhelmingly gracious to him, and other people bear most of the brunt of Lawrence’s insensitivity and mistakes. Coming-of-age movies have their conventional beats just like all other subgenres, but it’s a bit disappointing for a film with an uncompromisingly difficult character to let him off the hook so easily. You want to see Lawrence get his comeuppance, but the film instead conjures a tragic backstory and settles for understanding and progress and minor victories. 

This approach makes I Like Movies something of a crowd pleaser, especially for people who lived in Canada, and especially the GTA, during the early 2000s. There are loving references to the “Chanukah Song” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love and Cineplex and the Special Edition of Shrek on DVD. There are clips of Russell “The Cashman” Oliver’s infamous GTA “we buy gold” commercials. There are ironic references to the promises of the video store industry. Inexplicably, there is even a cameo by “Tanner Z” from the Cineplex Pre-Show—not that he’s playing himself. 

If you liked movies during this period, or if you yearn for depictions of the Greater Toronto Area on screen, it’ll be hard to resist the charms of I Like Movies. But for all the specificity and the prickly particularity of Lawrence as a character, it remains just that: a coming-of-age crowd pleaser. For a film that could’ve been a more daring indie dramedy, and that gestures at something more than the conventional, that’s a tad disappointing. But there is real charm here, and a successful evocation of a place and a time. 

Most of all, it captures a certain type of person that may hit closer to home than many cinephiles may realize. You have to wonder what Lawrence would’ve made of a movie like I Like Movies. It’s unlikely he would’ve realized its implications in his own life, but surely, he would’ve appreciated the indie cred of this Canadiana-infused take on the coming-of-age movie.

6 out of 10

I Like Movies (2023, Canada)

Written and directed by Chandler Levack; starring Isaiah Lehtinen, Romina D’Ugo, Krista Bridges, Percy Hynes White.

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