Reviews

My God, Abandon sucked ass. I only went to see it because my apartment is at the corner of Prince Arthur and Aylmer in Montreal's Milton-Park neighbourhood (a.k.a. the "McGill Ghetto") and most of the movie was filmed at McGill University, which is just one block to the west, and at the old Russian Consulate, which is literally next door; they closed off several streets in the neighbourhood shooting this in the summer of 2001. It's like it aspires to be an M. Night Shyamalan film, not quite a horror movie and not quite a psychological suspense drama, but fails miserably, and the plot twist ending was just stupid and completely unsatisfying, and then the film just ended suddenly (with only the briefest of denouement scenes) and that was only the point when I realized "Oh, that lame plot twist WAS the ending!"

And what really sucked more than anything else was that I didn't even get the satisfaction of seeing my apartment building on screen; the old Russian Consulate was used as the exterior of the abandoned, soon to be demolished, dorm and they composited my apartment building and the building next door on the other side out and added sky, just so it looked like the "dorm" was in a remote corner of the campus.

I'm glad I saw it at the old Famous Players cinema at Dorval and didn't pay full price to see it at the Paramount.

Mathnet had about the best production values I have ever seen on a kids' show. Nearly everything was shot on location rather than on cheap-looking sets, and they used as much natural light as possible. (It made the rest of Square One TV, the kids' math show where Mathnet first appeared, look really, really cheesy in comparison.) Also, and I'm not 100% sure on this, but it looked like they shot it on film stock, rather than videotape. And, of course, unlike a lot of kids' shows that do location shoots, this was actually filmed in Los Angeles and, later, New York (rather than Toronto or Vancouver) and they show a lot of the famous landmarks, like the Hollywood sign.

Simpsons fans will also recognize Yeardley Smith, the voice of Lisa Simpson (who really does speak like Lisa in real life), in one of the earliest Mathnet stories.

I saw this at 2 a.m. on Canada's Movie Network the other night. I only watched it because Tom Green was one of the top 3 billed stars in the description of the film that appeared on Bell ExpressVu when you press the INFO button. But, for the few of you like myself who actually appreciated FREDDY GOT FINGERED who maybe found the CLUTCH page at IMDB because you looked up "Tom Green" and wanted to watch one of his earlier films, from before he did SUPERSTAR and ROAD TRIP, my advice is, don't go out of your way to seek this movie out. He's only in one scene where he says (paraphrasing from memory) "You can't read that here! This place is for computers! This isn't for books! This is for computers, not books!" and so on. (If you have eagle eyes, you will also notice that one of the shows on television later in the film is the episode of Tom Green where he goes to Barbados or somewhere like that.) By comparison, Gordon "PJ Gord from YTV" Michael Woolvett (Seamus from ANDROMEDA) is in a helluva lot of scenes, but ExpressVu didn't mention him at all.