Everything's Gone Green

This is the much-vaunted screenwriting debut of Gen-X icon Douglas Coupland, and it manages to fall into a middle zone: it’s neither the triumph his fans would hope for nor the disaster his detractors were counting on. Paul Costanzo plays Ryan, a 29-year-old slacker diehard who’s managed to go nowhere as his friends have moved up and away. His luck changes when a) he manages to land a job with a lottery magazine and b) meets comely Ming (Steph Song), who is unfortunately attached to macho golf course designer Bryce (J.R. Bourne). Fortunately for Ryan, Ming’s starting to lose interest in her semi-criminal boyfriend; it’s too bad that boyfriend has sucked Ryan into a Yakuza money-laundering scheme. What’s a modern boy to do? Everything’s Gone Green moves along smoothly enough and has a few decent laughs via Aidan Devine’s dim-witted magazine editor. Still, one wants a little more. The film doesn’t aspire to much beyond being a relationship comedy with various social observations, and even those are sort of ticked off one by one instead of explored in depth — you get the impression that the details of the milieu are there for bragging rights rather than as a cause for genuine alarm. I’d like to think that the spokesperson for a generation would strive for more than being the male Canadian Nancy Meyers, which is pretty much what we’re dealing with, but who am I to argue? Here’s a Canadian movie that doesn’t take itself too seriously even when it’s taking itself seriously, and if the movie is piffle, it’s a better piffle than a few Yankee stinkers I could name. Art fanciers will be out of luck but diversion-seekers can count their blessings.