“Revolutionary” imagery infects the marketing for Vancouver native, editor-director stalwart Reg Harkema‘s Don McKellar-starring flawed-radical satire Monkey Warfare, writes Globe & Mail’s Guy Dixon. “Last September, posters appeared around Toronto on letterboxes and lampposts bearing the face of Canadian actress Nadia Litz, Che Guevara style, and [“I Fuck the Man”] in bold letters… The whole thing was a publicist’s idea. Litz, a petite young woman originally from Winnipeg, wasn’t so crazy about it. … But the tuned-in crowd knew that the posters were… a come-on for the indie film Monkey Warfare, one of the hippest… Canadian films at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.” Three months after TIFF, ” Litz sits in a Toronto coffee shop with co-stars Don McKellar and Tracy Wright [and] it’s not the film’s politics that animates the three actors, but the faux-radical posters. Litz’s character in the film is a pot dealer flirting with radicalism… In real life, Litz shudders thinking about the posters. “I’m a little girl, and I’m always alone walking down the street [when I see them],” she says… “Oh, grow up!” McKellar jokingly chastises her over tea. McKellar and Wright, a couple in the film and in real life, play characters rooted in an anonymous existence in Toronto’s lower-income Parkdale, harbouring their radical ways while hiding away from the authorities and from their neighbourhood’s creeping gentrification… “The characters, although they may be trying to sound cool, are always exposed for not being so. They never get away with being kick-ass,” McKellar says… Before Monkey Warfare, his third feature, the 39-year-old director co-wrote a script, which he tried to pitch to distributors at the Toronto festival years ago, about a woman who ends up suicide-bombing Toronto’s Molson Indy race. The pitch session with the distributor was the morning of Sept. 12, 2001. It had been originally scheduled for Sept. 11.” Harkema then made the doc Better Off in Bed on Vancouver’s New Pornographers, fronted by Neko Case. “Harkema dug so deeply into the band’s personal lives and relationships… that lawyers for New Pornographers singer Neko Case wouldn’t consent to the film’s release… “I think the Pornographers were a little uncomfortable about just how vérité the documentary ended up becoming.” Harkema quotes the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder epigram on making films about radicals, “I don’t make bombs, I make films.” However, there is a post-credits scene shown at Monkey Warfare‘s Toronto preem which has been shorn for theatrical release, “in which Vancouver filmmaker and actor Flick Harrison demonstrates how to make a Molotov cocktail, speaking in badly accented French… “The purely technical reason why it’s not going to appear is that our lawyers don’t want to sign off on it, because there’s some one-in-a-million chance someone will see it and actually be inspired to throw a Molotov cocktail,” Harkema says, laughing. “I can’t figure it out. Apparently there are far more explicit and worse things going on in the latest Bond film. I mean, lawyers are the real editors of films today.” The poster (pictured, with McKellar, rather than Litz) and other clips are at the film’s Myspace page, FlowerPowerIsDead, including the scissored “Molotov Cocktail safety video”.

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