When Tatiana Maslany appeared as a trash-talking teenager in Kate Melville’s Picture Day at last year’s Victoria film festival, she blew us away.
“You’ll be seeing plenty more of her,” I wrote of the Regina-born actress, and we have. She currently stars in the BBC sci-fi series Orphan Black.
Another opportunity to witness her chameleonic flair is Cas & Dylan, Jason Priestley’s engaging Canuck road movie at the Odeon until Thursday. Maslany plays Dylan, a free-spirited hitchhiker who endears herself to Cas (Richard Dreyfuss), a curmudgeonly Winnipeg-based 61-year-old doctor, during a road trip to the West Coast.
Pacific Northwest Pictures is so determined to lure filmgoers — always a challenge for “Canadian” films — the distributor is dangling a road trip as an incentive.
Filmgoers are asked to answer a question to be eligible for the prize that includes two nights at Wickaninnish Inn, a Hertz car rental from Vancouver airport to Tofino and a Tim Hortons travel gift basket.
As we watched this odd couple chug westward in a VW Beetle, Canada’s history of road movies sprang to mind — notably Don Shebib’s 1970 classic Goin’ Down the Road and One Week, with Joshua Jackson as a failed Toronto novelist who journeys to Tofino after being diagnosed with cancer.
It was the Canadian geography in Cas & Dylan that made online film critic Jason Whyte a champion of the film.
“There’s this nice yin and yang and this wonderful rapport, but it’s also fun to see Canada so nicely represented,” said Whyte, disappointed audiences haven’t been bigger.
“I’ve noticed a lot of people just aren’t coming to movies lately unless they’re the really big ones, like Divergent or Captain America.”
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