SEE SKIDLOVE IT UNTIL the 26th!

Ryan Arnold will be in attendance on Tuesday the 24th and Thursday the 26th! Come take at look at the last few chances to see the film in the theatre proper!


Here's what Jason Anderson @ The Toronto Star had to say...

Jason Anderson
Special to the Star

SKIDLOVE

Starring Jayme Keith, Ryan Arnold and Roger Bainbridge. Directed by Ryan Arnold. 80 minutes. At the Royal. Subject to Classification.

Such are the tools available to filmmakers today that the most intrepid directors can create feature films with the same amount of money that others spend on monthly parking spaces.

Ryan Arnold obviously didn't let a tiny budget impede his ambitions. However, a capacity for multi-tasking proved to be handy. Serving as writer, director, producer, editor, animator and star, the Vancouver-bred and Toronto-based filmmaker made his debut feature on the (very) cheap in locations in and around Parkdale.

A resulting quality of rough-hewn vitality is one of the primary virtues of Skidlove, a grubby but occasionally inspired indie drama that makes its local debut with a five-night run at the Royal starting Sunday.

Termed an “anti-romance” by its creator, Skidlove tells the unhappy story of twentysomething lovers Rennie (Ryan Arnold) and Page (Jayme Keith, who won a prize from the Whistler film festival for her performance).

Precise details about their lives are hard to come by due to Page's penchant for secrecy and the movie's own fragmentary nature — the images of people on screen are often accompanied only by eerie drones or dialogue from different scenes.

It gradually becomes clear that Page is involved in a bizarre corner of Toronto's black market, one devoted to the sale of young women's bodily fluids and dirty underwear. That, of course, is a very polite way of describing her arrangement with Ray (Roger Bainbridge), her increasingly high-strung connection to this little-known trade for fetishists.

Page's understandable reticence about divulging her source of income creates an atmosphere of mistrust in her relationship with Rennie. When not sullenly riding his bicycle through town or working on paintings in his apartment, Rennie tries to get Page to open up.

(Our glimpses of a thickly bearded and clearly self-destructive Rennie sometime in the future are omens of the nastiness that's to come, however.)

And it does get nasty, though Arnold's efforts to be transgressive have too little context or motivation to have the power they should. Likewise, the thinness of Skidlove's story and characters isn't entirely disguised by the often striking cinematography by Chris Clifford, the elliptical, non-linear editing or the jarring bits of animation that fracture the action even further.

Even so, this seedy hipster tragedy wears its micro-budget well and establishes Arnold as a promising and unusually determined new talent.

Check the article here - Toronto Star Skidlove