Childstar (2005)

People are voting emotionally.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

How 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.

I 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.

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.

Disappointing 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".