THE DARK SIDE OF THE CHEW - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Closing Gala Planet In Focus

Gum. The DIRTY secret.
The HEART of DARKNESS!
The desecration of body,
of soul, of Mother Earth!
The environmental PESTILENCE!

The Dark Side of the Chew (2014)
Dir. Andrew Nisker

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Watching this film was so utterly repulsive that I found myself gagging and retching throughout. These aberrant expulsions and reflex actions had nothing to do with the quality of the film or lack thereof. In fact, the picture so successfully delivered an important Western Union to my brain that I could have no other response. You see, I hate gum. I have always hated gum. Even as a kid, the very idea of incessantly chomping upon an atrophied orb that I had to spit out, leaving the mindlessly masticated, gob-glistening wad of filth on the ground, sickened me to the soul. And believe me, I had to spit out that malformed plug of putrescence for others to step upon because the very idea of having to, God forbid, touch it with my fingers, if even to dispose of it, induced within me a need to blow chunks of bilious puke willy nilly.

I hated seeing people chew gum. I hated when those same people blew bubbles, cracked it and even worse, chewed it with their maws agape. Where, when, why and how I developed this hatred of gum is a mystery to me. All I know for sure is that I've always possessed this unhinged aversion to it. Worse yet, in middle-age-crazy, my hatred for gum has accelerated with such force that I still go apoplectic when I see and/or hear anyone chewing it, but now, I know that if I was allowed to legally carry a handgun, I'd be tempted to use it upon whatever miscreant displayed such bovine behaviour.

My victims could be man, woman and child. My aim would be so true that I'd show no discriminatory mercy. I'd fill anyone full of lead and proudly declare that I'd be much happier watching an endless loop of Divine eating fresh, steaming dog shit in John Waters's Pink Flamingoes than to ever again witness purported human beings chew their goddamn gum as if they were raised in Texas.

Andrew Nisker's The Dark Side of the Chew is, at least for me, both a blessing and a curse. His one-hour TV Ontario (TVO) documentary beads its eyes upon the environmental pestilence of gum and has given me even more reasons to justify my hatred towards it.

Appearing in the movie himself, Nisker shanghais us aboard his Conradian tugboat for a country-hopping journey into a veritable Heart of Darkness. Nisker is Willard. Gum is Colonel Walter E. Kurtz.

What Nisker discovers is an environmental Apocalypse!

Now!

What we learn, as Nisker himself learns, is that gum is one of the biggest environmental blights upon the planet. In days of yore, gum was derived naturally from a weird-ass tree in the jungles that once teemed with the Mayan Aztecs. However, when the natural source of gum started to dry up, almost to the point of extinction, gum manufacturers had to find a new sticky source to inject with oodles of sugar and surround with flavoured, crunchy candy. And what, pray tell, did those pesky corporate piggies come up with? Well, hold onto your hats, folks.

Gum is made of plastic!

Yes, plastic. And where, oh where, does most gum end up? You guessed it. On sidewalks. Now, if it just stayed there, accumulating like some toxic, viscous gunk on the pavement, ever accumulating until. . . what? Mounds of sticky filth - impeding byways and highways? Nope. That's no good. And get this: there isn't a city that doesn't spend enough money to feed the world's starving populations several times over for several millennia to clean gum off the streets. Where does it all go? Into the water. Yup, tons and tons and tons of plastic are steamed off the streets and into the sewers and back into the water. From gum. Your gum, Clarabelle Cow. And this is not much good for any living thing.

Gum chewers are chewing plastic (cancer) infused with sugar (diabetes) or sugar-free chemicals like Aspartame (dementia), then they're spitting it up onto the ground whereupon it's "cleaned" up, right back into the environment.

This, frankly, is appalling enough, but Nisker doesn't stop there. Nay, he takes us deep into the heart of gum's darkness and we learn more about it in one hour than one would think was humanly impossible. We discover fossilized gum, we travel to various manufacturers of gum and we even get a couple of tastes of "greener" gum options. It still adds up to the same thing - waste and pollution.

Nisker even seeks to test out the scientific and medical claims made by gum manufacturers. A few of these tests are downright illuminating. Not surprisingly, we learn there is no truth to the ludicrous claims, but worse yet, we learn that many of the claims are so outrageous that they seriously affect those who buy into it and subsequently use it upon our children.

Ultimately, Nisker's film is so exhaustive, he might well have just called it Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Gum But Were Too Ignorant To Ask. We get the history of gum, its sociological and culture impact and most of all, the damage it's doing to ourselves and our planet.

All of this is presented in a breezy, clever and entertainingly digestible fashion. (Except, for me, during closeups of people chewing the wretched stuff and the clever digitally animated ooze of gum that floods the streets and even chases Nisker at one point like a river of molten lava, is hardly the stuff of intestinal comfort. I can feel the mounting need to expunge like some character in Sam Shepard's La Turista, the desire to engage in the dreaded Aztec two-step.)

For me, though, his movie makes me think that maybe, just maybe, I haven't been a madman for all these years. I now have an Encyclopedia Britannica worth of reasons to detest gum even more. And now, I even dream about gum and in my dreams I see a glob of gum crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream; that's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor... and ending up into the eco-system, the food chain and into my mouth - to ingest the cud-chewings of plastic, spat out upon the sidewalks of the world.

It's enough to make you sick.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars

The Dark Side of the Chew is the Closing Night Gala of the 2014 Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival in Toronto. For further info, please visit the festival's website by clicking HERE.

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THE LOST HIGHWAY (Theatrical Directors' Cut) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - One Chance in Toronto to see this entertainingly compelling picture the way its directors intended it to be seen until an expurgated version plays on the public educational broadcast entity TVO (TV Ontario) for reasons not known specifically to me (though I suppose I could guess), but certainly for reasons the filmmakers and the broadcaster DO know.

Once a major route between
Canada's largest city, Toronto
& Canada's Capital city, Ottawa,
this stretch of the Trans Canada
is one endless Ghost Town.

The Lost Highway (2013) ***½
Dir. Neil Graham, Derreck Roemer
Review By Greg Klymkiw

I could say life is just a bowl of Jello
And appear more intelligent and smart,
But I'm stuck like a dope
With a thing called hope,
And I can't get it out of my heart!
Not this heart ... -- from "South Pacific"
the hit musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein

Canada is overflowing with communities like Arden, Ontario. These towns, villages and hamlets are replete with piles of refuse, old abandoned vehicles, shuttered, rotting storefronts, eateries, motels, gas stations, homes and an almost cavernous, echoing cornucopia of other deader-than-a-doornail businesses and structures. Dolloped like mounds of waste matter along long stretches of abandoned highways and byways of our great country, they seem even more depressing to the naked eye than urban blight. We expect blight in larger urban cesspools, but not amidst the natural beauty resting beyond the borders of our deceptively genteel Gotham Cities. Our eyes see waste and decay in this rural paradise, but our hearts and minds are with those who once thrived in these locales. Sometimes, we even turn our thoughts to those who do manage to carve out a living in such places and we like to positively think that it might not be so bad. We imagine it might be a warm, restful and comfortable place to live, work and thrive. For all of us, who've had such thoughts, filmmakers Neil Graham and Derreck Roemer aim their camera-eyes upon one tiny slice of an alternately literal and figurative wasteland in their compelling, revealing and downright informative 74-minute documentary The Lost Highway.

The results prove to be less than positive once we meet the people. Sure, good intentions, good ideas and a kind of cockeyed optimism are the order of the day, but optimism, much less cockeyed optimism, doesn't put bread on the table and certainly doesn't point towards the healthiest of futures.

Once the main route from Canada's largest city, Toronto, to the nation's capital, Ottawa, Highway 7 has long been supplanted by larger highways and a once bustling two-lane-blacktop might well be the country's largest, longest strip of ghost town. Curiously, I've taken the route myself and have always found it to be a far more pleasant alternative to the supposed super highways that are so often wall-to-wall traffic jams, but there's no accounting for humanity's lemming-like behaviour, especially Torontonians who are infused with an almost pathological desire to lineup for everything.

The movie focuses primarily upon two families. One is Howard Gibbs, an 80-year-old owner of a gas station that's been part of his family for close to a century. His dream is to keep the business in the family. His daughter is a single mom and she decides to move to the old homestead and take a shot at it. Howard's a wily, irascible old coot - kind of like Bruce Dern in Nebraska, but with a decidedly Canadian timbre in his voice. He's a former local politician and full of the delightful corn-pone double-speak so many rural politicians are endowed with (and unlike some, he's not a crack user). It doesn't take us too long to realize there might be more than a few secrets Bill's keeping from us and by extension, his daughter. Alas, it seems to take her a longer time to figure that out and contributes mightily to the narrative thrust of the picture.

In fairness to the cracker-barrel-funny Howard, he's facing a disaster of monumental proportions. Some idiot bureaucrat (is there any other kind?) demands he sell off his remaining gas and shut his gas station down until an environmental assessment can be undertaken, the result of which will most certainly involve replacing the tanks. Bureaucrats demanding such things are always the sort of losers to target people who can't afford to properly fight them and the costs associated with these demands are extremely usurious. Howard assumes the idiot government doesn't want to discourage business and that if they're especially concerned about the environmental issues surrounding the state of the station's tanks, that they'll provide some form of financial relief. We wait, like Howard and his daughter, with baited breath to see if this will be so. In the meantime, Howard is forced to clear cut his acreage and sell off the trees as timber to make ends meet. So much for the environment. Fucking idiot bureaucrats!

The other family is a couple from the "big city" who move to Arden with a dream to build a swanky upscale lodge. This isn't the craziest idea in the world - if they can market to people who already use the route as an alternative to the superhighways or even institute a marketing plan that includes persuading people to consider the alternate route, they might just make it. Unfortunately, business doesn't boom. They were properly capitalized to setup, but don't necessarily have the capital to weather the usual early storms new businesses face.

Add to this, marital strife.

And yes, there's certainly even strife on display of a different kind between Howard and his daughter. He's either intentionally or naively withholding truths from her. The film takes on an added and harrowing dimension of parallel narratives involving family conflicts. (There's also a - I know, it shouldn't be funny, but it is - sequence where Howard just up and mysteriously disappears. Turns out, he's been on some wild shack-up with a friendly lassie.

In addition to the aforementioned, there's a nice subplot involving the remaining residents of Arden and their attempts to get people to stop in the town. Close, but no cigar, folks. There's really nothing in Arden to attract anyone to stop. Even if they did, what would they spend money on? What would they do? Patronize the one craft store that's not even open all year round? And no offence, but almost everyone living there seems ready for respite. Youth and plenty of it is what's needed, but in places like Arden, those not in their dotage are in short supply.

Directors Graham and Roemer have great material on their hands and within the slight, but perfectly pleasing 74-minute running time, they weave a tale that on the surface is exquisitely simple and direct, but just below the flesh, the movie reveals several layers that run deep to the core. There's also something very special and uniquely Canadian about the film and this version of the film would, no doubt, be of considerable interest to communities outside of the major centres. In a perfect world, it's the kind of picture that should be touring rural areas from coast to coast. The problems facing the town and subjects of the film are universal and not unlike those many communities face across the country. I daresay the film's universal qualities could even translate into rural areas throughout America's heartland. That the movie also presents a very real human element in terms of deception and strife amongst families, is a very luscious cherry on the hot fudge sundae.

And who knows, maybe the movie will even inspire a few lemmings from Toronto to take Highway 7.

The Lost Highway, at least for now, can only be seen in the manner its filmmakers intended, at one show, in one theatre, in one city: Sunday, April 6, 2014 at 4:00pm at the lovely community cinema The Revue at 400 Roncesvalles in the heart of Little Poland and High Park in Toronto. Rural viewers should be pestering the TIFF Film Circuit HERE about arranging screenings of this feature length cut. A version that appears to be less than one-hour-long will be playing on TVO's Doc Studio HERE, so Ontario viewers can watch this short version, or instead, start harassing the PUBLIC BROADCASTER to play the real version. A very nice lady who might be amenable to your desires is the Doc Studio's Commissioning Editor. She can be reached by emailing her HERE